rganism of man, triumphant and
omnipresent, would have seemed equally incredible to an intelligent
mammoth or a palaeolithic cave bear.

And, finally, there is always the prospect of a new disease. As yet
science has scarcely touched more than the fringe of the probabilities
associated with the minute fungi that constitute our zymotic diseases.
But the bacilli have no more settled down into their final quiescence
than have men; like ourselves, they are adapting themselves to new
conditions and acquiring new powers. The plagues of the Middle Ages, for
instance, seem to have been begotten of a strange bacillus engendered
under conditions that sanitary science, in spite of its panacea of
drainage, still admits are imperfectly understood, and for all we know
even now we may be quite unwittingly evolving some new and more terrible
plague--a plague that will not take ten or twenty or thirty per cent.,
as plagues have done in the past, but the entire hundred.

No; man's complacent assumption of the future is too confident. We
think, because things have been easy for mankind as a whole for a
generation or so, we are going on to perfect comfort and security in the
future. We think that we shall always go to work at ten and leave off at
four, and have dinner at seven for ever and ever. But these four
suggestions, out of a host of others, must surely do a little against
this complacency. Even now, for all we can tell, the coming terror may
be crouching for its spring and the fall of humanity be at hand. In the
case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen, I
repeat, the hour of its complete ascendency has been the eve of its
entire overthrow. But if some poor story-writing man ventures to figure
this sober probability in a tale, not a reviewer in London but will tell
him his theme is the utterly impossible. And, when the thing happens,
one may doubt if even then one will get the recognition one deserves.

THE WRITING OF ESSAYS

The art of the essayist is so simple, so entirely free from canons of
criticism, and withal so delightful, that one must needs wonder why all
men are not essayists. Perhaps people do not know how easy it is. Or
perhaps beginners are misled. Rightly taught it may be learnt in a brief
ten minutes or so, what art there is in it. And all the rest is as easy
as wandering among woodlands on a bright morning in the spring.

Then sit you down if you would join us, taking paper, pens, an