A reporter named Edward (“Ned”) Malone visits a woman named Gladys Hungerton. After suffering through a boring dinner with her pretentious father, he prepares to propose to her.

Gladys knows he is about to propose and asks him not to. She is not in love with Ned, but with the idea of an ideal man. She wants a famous man of action, like the adventurer Richard Burton. As Ned leaves her house, he resolves to perform great, impressive deeds worthy of her. That night, he thinks about his situation in his office at the Daily Gazette.

Ned speaks with his editor, a Scottish man named McArdle. Ned asks McArdle to assign him to an adventure. McArdle proposes that Ned expose Professor George Edward Challenger as a fraud. Two years prior, Challenger visited South America on an expedition. He returned with dubious stories about peculiar animals that still existed on the Southern continent, although they were long thought to be extinct.

Ned speaks with Tarp Henry, another writer who is also a bacteriologist. Henry tells Ned that Challenger claimed to have discovered “queer animals.” He gives Ned a transcript of an article entitled “Weissmann versus Darwin,” in which Challenger’s claims gained him the scorn of many academics.