OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN

Accomplished literature is all very well in its way, no doubt, but much more fascinating to the contemplative man are the books that have not been written.  These latter are no trouble to hold; there are no pages to turn over.  One can read them in bed on sleepless nights without a candle.  Turning to another topic, primitive man in the works of the descriptive anthropologist is certainly a very entertaining and quaint person, but the man of the future, if we only had the facts, would appeal to us more strongly.  Yet where are the books?  As Ruskin has said somewhere, a propos of Darwin, it is not what man has been, but what he will be, that should interest us.

The contemplative man in his easy-chair, pondering this saying, suddenly beholds in the fire, through the blue haze of his pipe, one of these great unwritten volumes.  It is large in size, heavy in lettering, seemingly by one Professor Holzkopf, presumably Professor at Weissnichtwo.  “The Necessary Characters of the Man of the Remote Future deduced from the Existing Stream of Tendency” is the title.  The worthy Professor is severely scientific in his method, and deliberate and cautious in his deductions, the contemplative man discovers as he pursues his theme, and yet the conclusions are, to say the least, remarkable.  We must figure the excellent Professor expanding the matter at great length, voluminously technical, but the contemplative man—­since he has access to the only copy—­is clearly at liberty to make such extracts and abstracts as he chooses for the unscientific reader.  Here, for instance, is something of practicable lucidity that he considers admits of quotation.  “The theory of evolution,” writes the Professor, “is now universally accepted by zoologists and botanists, and it is applied unreservedly to man.  Some question, indeed, whether it fits his soul, but all agree it accounts for his body.  Man, we are assured, is descended from ape-like ancestors, moulded by circumstances into men, and these apes again were derived from ancestral forms of a lower order, and so up from the primordial protoplasmic jelly.  Clearly then, man, unless the order of the universe has come to an end, will undergo further modification in the future, and at last cease to be man, giving rise to some other type of animated being.  At once the fascinating question arises, What will this being be?  Let us consider for a little the plastic influences at work upon our species.

“Just as the bird is the creature of the wing, and is all moulded and modified to flying, and just as the fish is the creature that swims, and has had to meet the inflexible conditions of a problem in hydrodynamics, so man is the creature of the brain; he will live by intelligence, and not by physical strength, if he live at all.  So that much that is purely ‘animal’ about him is being, and must be, beyond all question,