f our advanced civilization. How
can you make an oyster stout or train him down by making him jerk a
health lift so many hours every day, or cultivate his body at the
expense of his mind, without ultimately not only impairing the future
usefulness of the oyster himself, but at the same time affecting the
future of the human race who feed upon him?

I only use the oyster as an illustration, and I do not wish to cause
alarm, but I say that if we stimulate the oyster artificially and swell
him up by scientific means, we not only do so at the expense of his
better nature and keep him away from his family, but we are making our
mark on the future race of men. Oyster-fattening is now, of course, in
its infancy. Only a few years ago an effort was made at St. Louis to
fatten cove oysters while in the can, but the system was not well
understood, and those who had it in charge only succeeded in making the
can itself more plump. But now oysters are kept on ground feed and given
nothing to do for a few weeks, and even the older and overworked
sway-backed and rickety oysters of the dim and murky past are made to
fill out, and many of them have to put a gore in the waistband of their
shells. I only speak of the oyster incidentally, as one of the objects
toward which science has turned its attention, and I assert with the
utmost confidence that the time will come, unless science should get a
set-back, when the present hunting-case oyster will give place to the
open-face oyster, grafted on the octopus and big enough to feed a
hotel. Further than that, the oyster of the future will carry in a
hip-pocket a flask of vinegar, half a dozen lemons and two little
Japanese bottles, one of which will contain salt and the other pepper,
and there will be some way provided by which you can tell which is
which. But are we improving the oyster now? That is a question we may
well ask ourselves. Is this a healthy fat which we are putting on him,
or is it bloat? And what will be the result in the home-life of the
oyster? We take him from all domestic influences whatever in order to
make a swell of him by our modern methods, but do we improve his
condition morally, and what is to be the great final result on man?

The reader will see by the questions I ask that I am a true scientist.
Give me an overcoat pocket full of lower-case interrogation marks and
a medical report to run to, and I can speak on the matter of science and
advancement till Reason tott