The Academy of Absurd Experiments — Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver spends days in the Grand Academy of Lagado, a street of five hundred rooms where every projector has a scheme and the warden welcomes curious visitors. The first man he meets has spent eight years extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, sealing them in phials to warm raw summers, and begs a donation because cucumbers were dear this season. The tour turns grotesque. Professors turn human excrement into food, build houses from the roof down, plow with hogs by burying treats underground, and cure colic with bellows thrust eight inches up the fundament; Gulliver watches a dog die from the treatment. A universal artist condenses air and softens marble for pillows while others spin silk from spiders fed colored flies. In speculative learning a professor runs a word machine six hours a day, cranking random particles into folio volumes that will someday contain all arts and sciences if the public funds five hundred more frames. Gulliver promises to credit him as sole inventor. At the language school, one professor would cut all speech to nouns; another would abolish words entirely so people carry objects on their backs to converse, though women and the vulgar threatened rebellion and kept their tongues. At the mathematical school, propositions are written on wafers with cephalic ink for students to swallow on bread and water until the tincture reaches the brain. Success has not been answerable: boys find the bolus so nauseous they discharge it upward before it can operate, and none have been persuaded to fast long enough. Gulliver nods through it all, the polite visitor funding cucumbers while the country starves outside.