s strange book?" the
light skirmisher cut in.

"He's the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute at Paris, and
his book is called _The Nature of Man_."

"That blighting book!" One of the women who had caught on to the drift
of the talk contributed this anguished suspiration.

"Blighting? Is it blighting?" the first speaker parleyed.

"Don't you call it blighting," she returned, "to be told not only that
you are the descendant of an anthropoid ape--we had got used to
that--but of an anthropoid ape gone wrong?"

"Sort of simian degenerate," the light skirmisher formulated the case.
"We are merely apes in error."

The closest listener put this playfulness by. "What seems to me a
fundamental error of that book is its constant implication of a constant
fear of death. I can very well imagine, or I can easily allow, that we
are badly made, and that there are all sorts of 'disharmonies,' as
Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my own experience is that we are not
all the time thinking about death and dreading it, either in earlier or
later life, and that elderly people think less about it, if anything,
than younger people. His contention for an average life four or five
times longer than the present average life seems to be based upon an
obscure sense of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of life
here on earth which science forbids him to believe he shall satisfy
hereafter."

"Well, I suppose," the first speaker said, "that Metchnikoff may err in
his premises through a temperamental 'disharmony' of Russian nature
rather than of less specific human nature. The great Russian authors
seem to recognize that perpetual dread of death in themselves and their
readers which we don't recognize in ourselves or our Occidental friends
and neighbors. Other people don't think of death so much as he supposes,
and when they do they don't dread it so much. But I think he is still
more interestingly wrong in supposing that the young are less afraid of
death than the old because they risk their lives more readily. That is
not from indifference to death, it is from inexperience of life; they
haven't learned yet the dangers which beset it and the old have; that is
all."

"I don't know but you're right," the first speaker said. "And I couldn't
see the logic of Metchnikoff's position in regard to the 'instinct of
death' which he expects us to develop after we have lived, say, a
hundred and thirty or forty years, so that at a hun