‘I do not see,’ said Karenin, ’that there is any final limit to man’s power of self-modification.

‘There is none,’ said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face.  ’There is no absolute limit to either knowledge or power....  I hope you do not tire yourself talking.’

‘I am interested,’ said Karenin.  ’I suppose in a little while men will cease to be tired.  I suppose in a little time you will give us something that will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our jaded tissues almost at once.  This old machine may be made to run without slacking or cessation.’

‘That is possible, Karenin.  But there is much to learn.’

’And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don’t you think there will be some way of saving these?’

Fowler nodded assent.

’And then sleep again.  When man with his blazing lights made an end to night in his towns and houses—­it is only a hundred years or so ago that that was done—­then it followed he would presently resent his eight hours of uselessness.  Shan’t we presently take a tabloid or lie in some field of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of slumber and rise refreshed again?’

‘Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.’

’And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility.  Man who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years.  And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with.  You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred.  The psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden ideas.  So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting what we have learnt and preserving it for the race.  The race, the racial wisdom, science, gather power continually to subdue the individual man to its own end.  Is that not so?’

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new work that was in progress in India and Russia.  ’And how is it with heredity?’ asked Karenin.

Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many of the parental qualities could be determined.

‘He can actually do——?’

‘It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,’ said Fowler, ’but to-morrow it will be practicable.’