It was his size which took one’s breath away - his size and his imposing presence. Worse yet, Challenger’s physical appearance suggests nothing so much as a huge, hairy ape, as Malone describes: Indeed, as a professional iconoclast it would have been difficult for Challenger to navigate the often nasty, if petty, politics of academic life, and his Professorship seems to have been purely honorary. He is an independent scholar, as we now say, supported in his research by a series of inventions, and later by a rubber millionaire who leaves Challenger his fortune for the pursuit of science. Yet there is no evidence that Challenger is actually a professor, teaching students whether eager or intimidated. Address: Enmore Park, Kensington, W.’Īnd we soon learn that Challenger possesses, in entertainingly exaggerated degree, all the stereotypical traits of the dogmatic academic: irascible, combative, aggressively self-assured, and antisocial.

Section H, British Association’ - so on, so on! -‘Publications: “Some Observations Upon a Series of Kalmuck Skulls” “Outlines of Vertebrate Evolution” and numerous papers, including “The underlying fallacy of Weissmannism,” which caused heated discussion at the Zoological Congress of Vienna. Foreign Member of’ - well, quite a lot of things, about two inches of small type -‘Societe Belge, American Academy of Sciences, La Plata, etc., etc.

Winner of Crayston Medal for Zoological Research. Resigned after acrimonious correspondence same year. Assistant-Keeper of Comparative Anthropology Department, 1893. Educ.: Largs Academy Edinburgh University. Our first impression of Challenger - apart from learning that he’d broken the skull of a reporter from the Telegraph - is a summary of his professional achievements, read to anxious London Gazette reporter Ned Malone by his editor: George Challenger, physician and scientist, was introduced in the April 1912 Strand Magazine where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World was serialized. There is no evidence that Challenger is actually a professor, teaching students whether eager or intimidated.

Professor challenger the lost world