“Furthermore, fresh chemical discoveries came into action as modifying influences upon men.  In the prehistoric period even, man’s mouth had ceased to be an instrument for grasping food; it is still growing continually less prehensile, his front teeth are smaller, his lips thinner and less muscular; he has a new organ, a mandible not of irreparable tissue, but of bone and steel—­a knife and fork.  There is no reason why things should stop at partial artificial division thus afforded; there is every reason, on the contrary, to believe my statement that some cunning exterior mechanism will presently masticate and insalivate his dinner, relieve his diminishing salivary glands and teeth, and at last altogether abolish them.”

Then what is not needed disappears.  What use is there for external ears, nose, and brow ridges now?  The two latter once protected the eye from injury in conflict and in falls, but in these days we keep on our legs, and at peace.  Directing his thoughts in this way, the reader may presently conjure up a dim, strange vision of the latter-day face:  “Eyes large, lustrous, beautiful, soulful; above them, no longer separated by rugged brow ridges, is the top of the head, a glistening, hairless dome, terete and beautiful; no craggy nose rises to disturb by its unmeaning shadows the symmetry of that calm face, no vestigial ears project; the mouth is a small, perfectly round aperture, toothless and gumless, jawless, unanimal, no futile emotions disturbing its roundness as it lies, like the harvest moon or the evening star, in the wide firmament of face.”  Such is the face the Professor beholds in the future.

Of course parallel modifications will also affect the body and limbs.  “Every day so many hours and so much energy are required for digestion; a gross torpidity, a carnal lethargy, seizes on mortal men after dinner.  This may and can be avoided.  Man’s knowledge of organic chemistry widens daily.  Already he can supplement the gastric glands by artificial devices.  Every doctor who administers physic implies that the bodily functions may be artificially superseded.  We have pepsine, pancreatine, artificial gastric acid—­I know not what like mixtures.  Why, then, should not the stomach be ultimately superannuated altogether?  A man who could not only leave his dinner to be cooked, but also leave it to be masticated and digested, would have vast social advantages over his food-digesting fellow.  This is, let me remind you here, the calmest, most passionless, and scientific working out of the future forms of things from the data of the present.  At this stage the following facts may perhaps stimulate your imagination.  There can be no doubt that many of the Arthropods, a division of animals more ancient and even now more prevalent than the Vertebrata, have undergone more phylogenetic modification”—­a beautiful phrase—­“than even the most modified of vertebrated animals.  Simple forms like the lobsters display a primitive structure parallel with