This gives them their peculiar chemical attitude towards their food.

One often sees a member suddenly call the head waiter at breakfast to tell him that there is too much ammonia in the bacon; and another one protest at the amount of glucose in the olive oil; and another that there is too high a percentage of nitrogen in the anchovy.

A man of distorted imagination might think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of nemesis of fate upon the members.

But that would be very foolish, for in every case the head waiter, who is the chief of the Chinese philosophers mentioned above, says that he'll see to it immediately and have the percentage removed.

And as for the members themselves, they are about as much ashamed of manufacturing and merging things as the Marquis of Salisbury is ashamed of the founders of the Cecil family.
What more natural, therefore, than that Mr.Lucullus Fyshe, before serving the soda to the Duke, should try it on somebody else?
And what better person could be found for this than Mr.Furlong, the saintly young rector of St.Asaph's, who had enjoyed the kind of expensive college education calculated to develop all the faculties.