Each followed an essentially different current of ideas.
As soon as Barbicane had invented a new projectile, Nicholl invented a new plate armour.

The president of the Gun Club passed his life in piercing holes, the captain in preventing him doing it.

Hence a constant rivalry which even touched their persons.

Nicholl appeared in Barbicane's dreams as an impenetrable ironclad against which he split, and Barbicane in Nicholl's dreams appeared like a projectile which ripped him up.
Still, although they ran along two diverging lines, these _savants_ would have ended by meeting each other in spite of all the axioms in geometry; but then it would have been on a duel field.

Happily for these worthy citizens, so useful to their country, a distance of from fifty to sixty miles separated them, and their friends put such obstacles in the way that they never met.
At present it was not clearly known which of the two inventors held the palm.