ately superannuated altogether? A man
who could not only leave his dinner to be cooked, but also leave it to
be masticated and digested, would have vast social advantages over his
food-digesting fellow. This is, let me remind you here, the calmest,
most passionless, and scientific working out of the future forms of
things from the data of the present. At this stage the following facts
may perhaps stimulate your imagination. There can be no doubt that many
of the Arthropods, a division of animals more ancient and even now more
prevalent than the Vertebrata, have undergone more phylogenetic
modification"--a beautiful phrase--"than even the most modified of
vertebrated animals. Simple forms like the lobsters display a primitive
structure parallel with that of the fishes. However, in such a form as
the degraded 'Chondracanthus,' the structure has diverged far more
widely from its original type than in man. Among some of these most
highly modified crustaceans the whole of the alimentary canal--that is,
all the food-digesting and food-absorbing parts--form a useless solid
cord: the animal is nourished--it is a parasite--by absorption of the
nutritive fluid in which it swims. Is there any absolute impossibility
in supposing man to be destined for a similar change; to imagine him no
longer dining, with unwieldy paraphernalia of servants and plates, upon
food queerly dyed and distorted, but nourishing himself in elegant
simplicity by immersion in a tub of nutritive fluid?

"There grows upon the impatient imagination a building, a dome of
crystal, across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most
glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the
centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white
marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid, and in this
plunge and float strange beings. Are they birds?

"They are the descendants of man--at dinner. Watch them as they hop on
their hands--a method of progression advocated already by
Bjornsen--about the pure white marble floor. Great hands they have,
enormous brains, soft, liquid, soulful eyes. Their whole muscular
system, their legs, their abdomens, are shrivelled to nothing, a
dangling, degraded pendant to their minds."

The further visions of the Professor are less alluring.

"The animals and plants die away before men, except such as he preserves
for his food or delight, or such as maintain a precarious footing about
h