Myers adds that with two references in the chapter (Professor Gargan's book, Twilight of the Gonads, and Reichsmotif) "we have a recurring if punning Wagnerian association (in case you're terminally musically illiterate, Götterdammerung, or Twilight of the Gods, is the concluding opera of Richard Wagner's mighty Ring of the Nibelung tetraology, and leitmotif is the term for themes identified with a specific character, situation or emotion that appear throughout the four operas). Nothing profound was intended here, I believe, but please note that whenever Bellairs wanted to sound particularly pompous, he would make up pseudo-Germanic words and names."

Both Myers and Bowen guess that the professor's scientific work with yaws is at best a dubious benefaction to humanity and probably did himself in, not that that fact lends the passage any more significance.