lumes. It is large in size, heavy in lettering,
seemingly by one Professor Holzkopf, presumably Professor at
Weissnichtwo. "The Necessary Characters of the Man of the Remote Future
deduced from the Existing Stream of Tendency" is the title. The worthy
Professor is severely scientific in his method, and deliberate and
cautious in his deductions, the contemplative man discovers as he
pursues his theme, and yet the conclusions are, to say the least,
remarkable. We must figure the excellent Professor expanding the matter
at great length, voluminously technical, but the contemplative
man--since he has access to the only copy--is clearly at liberty to make
such extracts and abstracts as he chooses for the unscientific reader.
Here, for instance, is something of practicable lucidity that he
considers admits of quotation. "The theory of evolution," writes the
Professor, "is now universally accepted by zoologists and botanists, and
it is applied unreservedly to man. Some question, indeed, whether it
fits his soul, but all agree it accounts for his body. Man, we are
assured, is descended from ape-like ancestors, moulded by circumstances
into men, and these apes again were derived from ancestral forms of a
lower order, and so up from the primordial protoplasmic jelly. Clearly
then, man, unless the order of the universe has come to an end, will
undergo further modification in the future, and at last cease to be man,
giving rise to some other type of animated being. At once the
fascinating question arises, What will this being be? Let us consider
for a little the plastic influences at work upon our species.

"Just as the bird is the creature of the wing, and is all moulded and
modified to flying, and just as the fish is the creature that swims, and
has had to meet the inflexible conditions of a problem in hydrodynamics,
so man is the creature of the brain; he will live by intelligence, and
not by physical strength, if he live at all. So that much that is purely
'animal' about him is being, and must be, beyond all question,
suppressed in his ultimate development. Evolution is no mechanical
tendency making for perfection, according to the ideas current in the
year of grace 1897; it is simply the continual adaptation of plastic
life, for good or evil, to the circumstances that surround it.... We
notice this decay of the animal part around us now, in the loss of teeth
and hair, in the dwindling hands and feet of men, in their smaller jaw