A growing animal was rather like an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and must then be oiled before it can run again.

("But why shouldn't one oil the engine from without ?" said Mr.Bensington, when he read the paper.) And all this, said Redwood, with the delightful nervous inconsecutiveness of his class, might very probably be found to throw a light upon the mystery of certain of the ductless glands.

As though they had anything to do with it at all! In a subsequent communication Redwood went further.

He gave a perfect Brock's benefit of diagrams--exactly like rocket trajectories they were; and the gist of it--so far as it had any gist--was that the blood of puppies and kittens and the sap of sunflowers and the juice of mushrooms in what he called the "growing phase" differed in the proportion of certain elements from their blood and sap on the days when they were not particularly growing.
And when Mr.Bensington, after holding the diagrams sideways and upside down, began to see what this difference was, a great amazement came upon him.

Because, you see, the difference might probably be due to the presence of just the very substance he had recently been trying to isolate in his researches upon such alkaloids as are most stimulating to the nervous system.