My Uncle Oswald

'Perfectly. What animals did you use for these experiments?'

'Bulls and cows,' A. R. Woresley said. 'I have a brother who owns a small dairy farm over at Steeple Bumpstead not far from here. He had a bull and about eighty cows. We had always been good friends, my brother and I. So I confided in him, and he agreed to let me use his animals. After all, I wasn't going to hurt them. I might even do him a favour.'

'How could you do him a favour?'

'My brother has never been well-off. His own bull, the only one he could afford, was of moderate quality. He would dearly love to have had his whole herd of cows bear calves by a splendid prize bull from very high milk-yielding stock.'

'You mean someone else's bull?'

'Yes, I do.'

'How would you go about obtaining semen from someone else's valuable prize bull?'

'I would steal it.'

'Ah-ha.'

'I would steal one ejaculation, and then, provided of course that I was successful with my experiments, I would share out that single ejaculation, those five thousand million sperm, among all of my brother's eighty cows.'

'How would you share it out?' I asked.

'By what I call hypodermic insemination. By injecting the sperm into the cow with a syringe.'

'I suppose that's possible.'

'Of course it's possible,' he said. 'After all, the male sexual organ is itself really nothing more than a syringe for injecting semen.'

'Steady on,' I said. 'Mine's a bit more than that.'

'I don't doubt it, Cornelius, I don't doubt it,' he answered dryly. 'But shall we stick to the point?'

'Sorry.'

'So I started experimenting with bulls' semen.'

I picked up the bottle of port and refilled his glass. I had the feeling now that old Woresley was on to something pretty interesting and I wanted to keep him going.

'I've told you,' he said, 'that the average bull produces about five ccs of fluid each time. That's not much. Even when mixed with glycerol there wouldn't be enough there for me to start dividing it up into a great many parts and then expect to be able to inject each of those tiny parts into separate cows. So I had to find a dilutant, something to increase the volume.'

'Why not add more glycerol?'

'I tried it. It didn't work. Altogether too viscous. I won't bore you with a list of all the curious substances I experimented with. I will simply tell you the one that works. Skimmed milk works. Eighty per cent skimmed milk, ten per cent egg yolk and ten per cent glycerol. That's the magic mixture. The sperm love it. You simply mix the whole cocktail thoroughly, and that, as you can see, gave me a practical volume of fluid to experiment with. So for several years, I worked with my brother's cows, and finally I arrived at the optimum dose.'

'What was it?'

'The optimum dose was no more than twenty million spermatozoa per cow. When I injected that into a cow at the right time, I got eighty per cent pregnancies. And don't forget, Cornelius,' he went on excitedly, 'that each bull's ejaculation contains five thousand million sperm. Divided up into doses of twenty million, that gives two hundred and fifty separate doses! It was amazing! I was flabbergasted!'

'Does that mean,' I said, 'that with just one of my own ejaculations I could make two hundred and fifty women pregnant?'

'You are not a bull, Cornelius, much as you may like to think you are.'

'How many females could one of my ejaculations do?'

'About a hundred. But I am not about to help you.'

By God, I thought, I could knock up about seven hundred women a week at that rate! 'Have you actually proved this with your brother's bull?' I asked.

'Many times,' A. R. Woresley said. 'It works. I collect one ejaculation, then I quickly mix it up with skimmed milk, egg yolk and glycerol, then I measure it into single doses before freezing.'