and all through your wanting to swallow that
dose of cyanide at No. 36 Rue des Ursulines Blanches, and my having
the gumption to prevent you!

"It's a good seed that we have sown, you and I. It was not right
that this beautiful planet should go much longer drifting through
space without a single hope that is not an illusion, without a
single hint of what life should really be, without a goal.

"Why such darkness under so bright a sun! such blindness to what is
so patent! such a deaf ear to the roaring of that thunderous harmony
which you call the eternal silence!--you of the earth, earthy, who
can hear the little trumpet of the mosquito so well that it makes
you fidget and fret and fume all night, and robs you of your rest.
Then the sun rises and frightens the mosquitoes away, and you think
that's what the sun is for and are thankful; but why the deuce a
mosquito should sting you, you can't make out!--mystery of
mysteries!

"At the back of your brain is a little speck of perishable matter,
Barty; it is no bigger than a needle's point, but it is bigger in
you than in anybody else I know, except in Leah; and in your
children it is bigger still--almost as big as the point of a pin!

"If they pair well, and it is in them to do so if they follow their
inherited instinct, their children and their children's children
will have that speck still bigger. When that speck becomes as big as
a millet-seed in your remote posterity, then it will be as big as in
a Martian, and the earth will be a very different place, and man of
earth greater and even better than the Martian by all the greatness
of his ampler, subtler, and more complex brain; his sense of the
Deity will be as an eagle's sense of the sun at noon in a cloudless
tropical sky; and he will know how to bear that effulgence without a
blink, as he stands on his lonely summit, ringed by the azure world.

"Indeed, there will be no more Martians in Mars by that time; they
are near the end of their lease; all good Martians will have gone to
Venus, let us hope; if not, to the Sun itself!

"Man has many thousands of years before him yet ere his little ball
of earth gets too cold for him; the little speck in his brain may
grow to the size of a pea, a cherry, a walnut, an egg, an orange!
He will have in him the magnetic consciousness of th