already knows by instinct many things that their greatest physicists could hardly arrive at by forty years of strenuous study.  Her simple direct sense of space-time and quantity unconsciously solves problems which cost their most famous mathematicians years of prolonged and laborious calculations requiring such intense mental application that they frequently forgot to breathe when engaged in them, and almost suffocated themselves in consequence.

ECRASIA.  Leave these obscure prehistoric abortions; and come back to your synthetic man and woman.

PYGMALION.  When I undertook the task of making synthetic men, I did not waste my time on protoplasm.  It was evident to me that if it were possible to make protoplasm in the laboratory, it must be equally possible to begin higher up and make fully evolved muscular and nervous tissues, bone, and so forth.  Why make the seed when the making of the flower would be no greater miracle?  I tried thousands of combinations before I succeeded in producing anything that would fix high-potential Life Force.

ARJILLAX.  High what?

PYGMALION.  High-po-tential.  The Life Force is not so simple as you think.  A high-potential current of it will turn a bit of dead tissue into a philosopher’s brain.  A low-potential current will reduce the same bit of tissue to a mass of corruption.  Will you believe me when I tell you that, even in man himself, the Life Force used to slip suddenly down from its human level to that of a fungus, so that men found their flesh no longer growing as flesh, but proliferating horribly in a lower form which was called cancer, until the lower form of life killed the higher, and both perished together miserably?

MARTELLUS.  Keep off the primitive tribes, Pygmalion.  They interest you; but they bore these young things.

PYGMALION.  I am only trying to make you understand.  There was the Life Force raging all round me:  there was I, trying to make organs that would capture it as a battery captures electricity, and tissues that would conduct it and operate it.  It was easy enough to make eyes more perfect than our own, and ears with a larger range of sound; but they could neither see nor hear, because they were not susceptible to the Life Force.  But it was far worse when I discovered how to make them susceptible; for the first thing that happened was that they ceased to be eyes and ears and turned into heaps of maggots.

ECRASIA.  Disgusting!  Please stop.

ACIS.  If you don’t want to hear, go away.  You go ahead, Pyg.

PYGMALION.  I went ahead.  You see, the lower potentials of the Life Force could make maggots, but not human eyes or ears.  I improved the tissue until it was susceptible to a higher potential.

ARJILLAX [intensely interested] Yes; and then?

PYGMALION.  Then the eyes and ears turned into cancers.

ECRASIA.  Oh, hideous!