Gulliver thought the professors were out of their senses when he visited the Grand Academy of Lagado on the Isle of Balnibarbi. He was bemused by their many improbable schemes--extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, constructing houses from the rood down, and training pigs to plow with their snouts. Yet however bold and inventive the various projects and their 'projectors' (as he termed the scientists were, there remained something troubling about his visit to the academy, something fundamentally deficient about the experts and their ideas.