Me. BE. Kaye Robinson has drawn a particularly unflattering portrait of the Fature Man. Just as in point of hair, teeth, and prehensile and locomotive powers, we are inferior to our alleged quadramanous ancestors, so will our descendants be inferior to us; 80 infer rior, in faot, as to be wholly defenceless, in consequence, extremely timid.
pathies with those who trast that before that dreadful day arri the day of toothless, hairless, tottering homauity, the earth will have fallen into the sun, or become too cold to support its degenerating inhabitants. Bat p Mr. Robinson has kindly left ouo part, and that a very important part, of our nature untoucited. Ho doos not cou-mu us to encroaching idiocy; on the goutrary, the mere foot of our growing ness mill, we hope, lead to such sharpening, of the intellectual powers as our wretched physical condition will render necessary. Though we deteriorate in body, there is no reason why we should not hope to advance in mind. It jo, we believe, Mr. Herbert Spencer, one of his earlier essays sugs the high probability that five th and years hence men will bear "the same relation in point of culture to us of the present day that we now bear to the supposed primeval man of, say, five thousand years ago. The idea is a very striking one, and by no means unsupported by analogy. In fact we think the case might be put even more strongly. If mankind in its primitive stage, with so little to stare from and so little intellectual material on which to work, has raised itself to its present elevation in art, literature, science, and all that comes under the head of culture, surely, having advanced so far, the rate of progress during the next five thousand years will be even more rapid than heretofore, taking into consideration the accumulated capital of. progress and experience which our descendants will inherit from us, That there is reason to believe that man has existed on the globe for even millions of years we are of course aware. The argument is however really unaffected by this consideration, for probably no one will gravely argue that our present state of civilisation is the result of a million years of progress Cataclysms and catastrophes have, no doubt, arrested the advancement of the species by sweeping whole continents bare of their inhabitants, and in various ways interfered with or diverted the onward march of humanity. It is enough for our argument that five thousand years may suffice to raise the painted fetish-worshipper to the status of a civilised and intellectual being, and us a matter of fact the process has been completed in very much shorter period in the conse of individanl nation The isto thus opened to us is, there. fore, when closely examined, little less than dazzling. The proposition may be pat in the form of a common rale-of-three sum: as the primeval cave-man is, in point of knowledge, to Professor Tyndal, Mr. Matthew Arnold, or Mr. Herbert Spencer him. self, so is either one of these great mon to the man who shall live five thousand years from now, It is difficult for us to realise the personality of a human being in comparison with whom the foremost spirits of to-day would be more savages, and equally difficult to form any very clear conception of what society will be like in that distant fature. Progress has been going on so rapidly of late years that we are now justified in entertaining as sober probabilities things which " hundred years ago might have formed the basis of an Eastern fairy-tale but which could never have entered into the speculations of the wildest theorist. What our forefathers did not even seo through " glass darkly we now behold face to face, and is ranked among the commonplaces of our every-day exist. ence. We think it is Mr. Smiles who tells the story of a man who died in a madhouse, where lo was confined for, avowing his firm belief that, ere long it would' be possible to travel by steam at the rate of forty miles an hour. At that time, and it was not so very long ago either, there were no means of travel in England more expo tious or commodious than a lumbéring conch, which rambled over roads well-nigh as bad as the most primiti cart-tracks in the north of China. Is there anything inherently absurd, then, in the hope that even five hundred hence the people of that day will appliances for locomotion as much superior to a-London express-train as an express train is to a Chinese country cart? An express train, with all its wonderful concomitants of speed, comfort, punctuality, and arrangements for meeting or avoiding fifty other trains at different stations, is not more hopelessly removed from the conosptions of a Chinese carter than the vehicle of the future is from our own coriceptions, There are few men, perhaps, to whom the world owes more than to Mr. Edison. But in the days to come, we can fancy Mr, Edison being written of patronisingly as a man who certainly did good work in his time, but' who was nevertheless a very ignorant and very clumsy experimentalist; his inventions being regarded, perhaps, just as the foremost chronometer-maker of our own day may now regard the efforts of King Alfred to measure time by candles, Already, however, Mr. Edison has in some degree raised the veil of the future, and by his extraordinary discoveries enabled us to imagine what the world will be like when those dis. coveries become part and parcel of the daily lifo of the inhabitants; when the microphone, the photophone, and the phonograph shall be as common as haudbells and corkscrews are but perfected, idealized, aid so used'as to endow the race with powers as much exceeding those which proceed from our natural organs of sense as" sich organs exceed those of moles and bats. And the same speculations may permis. sibly be applied to political and social organisations, Ouo of the most remark. able phenomena the world has over seen in this especial sphere was the civilisation of the Incas,. But the matchless order and homogeneity which formed its distinguishing characteristic were probably not greater than those which prevail in an empire or colony of ants. Huber, one of the most intelligent and painstaking of observers, makes the impressive statement that if you will watch n single ant at work, you can tell what ho will do next. " On'the visit of an overseer ant to the works, ho says elsewhere, " when the labourers lind began the roof too soon," he examined it and had it taken down, the wall raised to its proper height, and a new ceiling constructed with'the fragments of the old one." " With awe and wonder," writes Da Bois-Raymond, " must the student of Nature regard that microscopic. molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant. It has developed itself to its present state through a countless series of generations." Dr. Draper contenta himself
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.