give
readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the
production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far from
mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion," concluded
Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, "if it were not for your
incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things--if you had
once understood the action of any delicate machine--you would perceive
that the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena would
require many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably
stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open."

"Precisely," said I, with a meekness which I felt was praiseworthy; "it
is the feebleness of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you to the
human average, that perhaps enables me to imagine certain results better
than you can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers, gullible as they
look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another order of
facts, form fewer false expectations about each other than we should
form about them if we were in a position of somewhat fuller intercourse
with their species; for even as it is we have continually to be
surprised that they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take me
then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate
the justice of my ideas by my facial expression."

"Pooh!" says Trost (We are on very intimate terms.)

"Naturally," I persisted, "it is less easy to you than to me to imagine
our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is
possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death.
But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine
myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving
way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I
would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new
light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or
structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw,
there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and
chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply
its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular
movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This
last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an
unforeseen result, one sees that the proces