Dr. Ox's Experiment

"Asparagus attained the height of several feet; the artichokes swelled to the size of melons, the melons to the size of pumpkins, the pumpkins to the size of gourds, the gourds to the size of the belfrey bell, which measured, in truth, nine feet in diameter. The cabbages were bushes, and the mushrooms umbrellas...It required two people to eat a strawberry, and four to consume a pear...Drunken people staggered in the streets, and they were often citizens of high position." Can this be the once-tranquil town of Quiquendone, within whose walls, writes Jules Verne, "there has not been the shadow of a discussion for a century, the coachmen do not insult each other, the dogs do not bite, the cats do not scratch?" It is the same town, but into it has come a bold man of science, the physiologist Dr. Ox, creator of a remarkable theory: that virtue, courage, talent, wit, and imagination are all merely a question of oxygen! To test this idea, he devises a mass experiment, using the whole town as his subject. The progress of this experiment is recorded in the funniest story ever written by the nineteenth-century master of science fiction. As the town falls more and more under Dr. Ox's influence, the populace, the dogs, the cats, and the vegetables, are roused from their lethargy to fearful and comic heights - including the armed invasion of a neighboring village over the question of a twelfth-century cow!