And then he did an extraordinary thing: he put his notes away and for the next decade and a half busied himself with other matters. He fathered ten children, devoted nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles ("I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he sighed, understandably, upon the work's conclusion), and fell prey to strange disorders that left him chronically listless, faint, and "flurried," as he put it. The symptoms nearly always included a terrible nausea and generally also incorporated palpitations, migraines, exhaustion, trembling, spots before the eyes, shortness of breath, "swimming of the head," and, not surprisingly, depression.

The cause of the illness has never been established, but the most romantic and perhaps likely of the many suggested possibilities is that he suffered from Chagas's disease, a lingering tropical malady that he could have acquired from the bite of a Benchuga bug in South America. A more prosaic explanation is that his condition was psychosomatic. In either case, the misery was not. Often he could work for no more than twenty minutes at a stretch, sometimes not that.