another and tell each other about their developmental progress.

"They have no knowledge, and cannot even conceive the existence of
anything that is not such as they are themselves. Those who have been
born are to them what the dead are to us. They can see no life in
them, and know no more about them than they do of any stage in their
own past development other than the one through which they are passing
at the moment. They do not even know that their mothers are
alive--much less that their mothers were once as they now are. To an
embryo, its mother is simply the environment, and is looked upon much
as our inorganic surroundings are by ourselves.

"The great terror of their lives is the fear of birth,--that they
shall have to leave the only thing that they can think of as life, and
enter upon a dark unknown which is to them tantamount to annihilation.

"Some, indeed, among them have maintained that birth is not the death
which they commonly deem it, but that there is a life beyond the womb
of which they as yet know nothing, and which is a million fold more
truly life than anything they have yet been able even to imagine. But
the greater number shake their yet unfashioned heads and say they have
no evidence for this that will stand a moment's examination.

"'Nay,' answer the others, 'so much work, so elaborate, so wondrous as
that whereon we are now so busily engaged must have a purpose, though
the purpose is beyond our grasp.'

"'Never,' reply the first speakers; 'our pleasure in the work is
sufficient justification for it. Who has ever partaken of this life
you speak of, and re-entered into the womb to tell us of it? Granted
that some few have pretended to have done this, but how completely
have their stories broken down when subjected to the tests of sober
criticism. No. When we are born we are born, and there is an end of
us.'

"But in the hour of birth, when they can no longer re-enter the womb
and tell the others, Behold! they find that it is not so."

Here the reader again closed his book and resumed his place in the apse.

CHAPTER XVI: PROFESSOR HANKY PREACHES A SERMON, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH MY
FATHER DECLARES HIMSELF TO BE THE SUNCHILD

Professor Hanky then went up into the pulpit, richly but soberly robed in
vestments the exact nature of which I cannot determine. His carriage was
dignified, an