as though I fully understood her.

"I am more bewildered than ever," I exclaimed. "I cannot comprehend
you."

"Come with me," she said.

I followed her into the Chemist's Laboratory. She bade me look into a
microscope that she designated, and tell her what I saw.

"An exquisitely minute cell in violent motion," I answered.

"Daughter," she said, solemnly, "you are now looking upon the germ of
_all_ Life, be it animal or vegetable, a flower or a human being, it has
that one common beginning. We have advanced far enough in Science to
control its development. Know that the MOTHER is the only important part
of all life. In the lowest organisms no other sex is apparent."

I sat down and looked at my companion in a frame of mind not easily
described. There was an intellectual grandeur in her look and mien that
was impressive. Truth sat, like a coronet, upon her brow. The revelation
I had so longed for, I now almost regretted. It separated me so far from
these beautiful, companionable beings.

"Science has instructed you how to supercede Nature," I said, finally.

"By no means. It has only taught us how to make her obey us. We cannot
_create_ Life. We cannot develop it. But we can control Nature's
processes of development as we will. Can you deprecate such a power?
Would not your own land be happier without idiots, without lunatics,
without deformity and disease?"

"You will give me little hope of any radical change in my own lifetime
when I inform you that deformity, if extraordinary, becomes a source of
revenue to its possessor."

"All reforms are of slow growth," she said. "The moral life is the
highest development of Nature. It is evolved by the same slow processes,
and like the lower life, its succeeding forms are always higher ones.
Its ultimate perfection will be mind, where all happiness shall dwell,
where pleasure shall find fruition, and desire its ecstasy.

"It is the duty of every generation to prepare the way for a higher
development of the next, as we see demonstrated by Nature in the
fossilized remains of long extinct animal life, a preparatory condition
for a higher form in the next evolution. If you do not enjoy the fruit
of your labor in your own lifetime, the generation that follows you will
be the happier for it. Be not so selfish as to think only of your own
narrow span of life."

"By what means have you reached so grand a development?" I asked.

"By the careful study of, and adherence to,