The Professor here begun to roll up his profile. He was evidently preparing to leave, but as long as he had been with me, and it seemed as if it were days, I was more loath than ever to part with him. My dread of the separation rapidly grew into a veritable panic, and I became so desperate as to beseech him, if he must go, to take me with him. He was evidently much amused, and I thought gratified as well, but explained that it would be impossible at that time, as his storage capacity for compressed air was only sufficient for one, and his car was in fact hardly suited to carry double.
“Then,” said I, “give me a few moments longer if you possibly can. I do so wish to know something of our posterity ten millenniums ahead—twenty—a hundred. But no I am selfish—you are doubtless suffering now from your long stay and I ought not to ask anything more.”
“Say no more,” he said, “I will stay a few moments longer. I am not seriously inconvenienced as yet. But I cannot give you continuous history as that will take too long, but I will post you on a few prominent points that will interest you.
“One thing you will consider remarkable in the beginning of the first millennium, is a growing disregard for the accumulation of great wealth. The day of millionaires passed away before the close of the 20th century. Legislation looking to the reduction of great estates and the prevention of such overgrown accumulations in the future, was enacted at the beginning of the century. But the spirit of greed was not outgrown until the creation of wealth became so easy and under such control by the state that more than enough for comfort and ease was placed at the command of every one. No one was obliged to pay for anything, more than it cost, because the state would furnish all that was necessary on those terms, if no one else would. Speculative profits were abolished and the cost of an article was made up of wages only—the wage of the man in getting the raw material, the wage of the factors and the machinery in its fabrication, the cost of transportation, the wage of the salesman etc., all added together. The accumulation of excessive wealth was possible only when the speculator got hold of something it was necessary for other people to have, and who then made them pay for it much more than it cost him. This was all stopped as I said, before the close of the 20th century. But it was reserved to the beginning of the millennium to produce wealth in such abundance that it was not possible for anybody to have a single thing that it was essential for anybody else to have.
“The material means of comfort and happiness exist on the earth as abundantly as the air for breathing. The education of the human race consists in their learning how to take and use them. Having learned this, the abundance of wealth is its security against the monopoly of the greedy, and so your millennium begins with available wealth so plentiful, that its surplus accumulation has no longer a sane object, and there is no more reason in a man hoarding it than in his eating the surplus food on the dinner table after he has had enough.
“In your day if all the wealth of the world had been equally divided among its inhabitants there would hardly have been enough for each person, to maintain him one year. The people lived from hand to mouth, and if the earth had failed to bring forth her bounty in crops for one year, half the population would have perished. Now if sun and rain should fail to mature the crops, the giant laboratories of artificial food can soon supply the deficiency. The tendency of the times is to depend less and less on the cultivation of the natural foods that are liable to the chances of unfavorable wind and weather, and to rely on the artificial products the creation of which is a matter of scientific certainty and accuracy.
“Let us now put ourselves forward again; this time one hundred millenniums, and look into the past as we have done before. We shall see that before the middle of the first millennium the principal articles of food are artificial productions identically like the natural foods formerly used such as milk, flour, meat, butter, fruits, vegetables etc. In addition to these many other foods were invented similar and equivalent to these natural productions. Later on the artificial products came more and more to consist of the proximate principles and condensed forms of food, fats, oils, sugar, and starch, gum, gluten, albumen, fibrin, casein, gelatine etc., directly from minerals, especially coal, or from cheap vegetation such as weeds that in your day were destroyed as worthless, sea weed etc., also from sea animals. Nothing came amiss, chemistry could produce rich and nourishing food from what in your day were the most unpromising materials, and at a merely nominal cost too, because power was furnished by the sun as I have explained to you. The constant tendency of chemical discovery was toward the production of foods in their purity, unmixed with the bulky residuum that goes with natural foods and that in the process of assimilation has to be rejected. As the foods thus became more condensed and pure a few spoons full became the daily food of a man, the pleasures of the table became less keen and protracted and gradually fell out of fashion. Other methods of recreation were more cultivated, such as music, oratory, the lyceum, theater, scientific lectures and experiments, games, etc. In many other respects the habits and fashions of life changed during the first millennium. The practice of walking was almost discontinued; flying machines having come into universal use. They reached perfection and were so inexpensive to operate, that they became a part of the equipment of everybody. Gentlemen went to their business, ladies went shopping, children went to school, with their flyers, as they formerly used to do to a less universal extent, with their bicycles.
“The changes that took place in the habits of the people in respect to eating, walking and other things, reacted upon their physical development, slowly and imperceptibly, however, unless comparisons were made between people of several generations apart. The tendency as you know, is, toward the suppression of organs not habitually used. Use and habit keep all organs in good running order and develop them in size and health, whereas disuse allows them to become shriveled and reduced, and if it is persisted in for too many generations the organ will be reduced to an unrecognizable functionless remnant or disappear altogether. All animals including man have lost organs by ceasing to use them. Very many, as the ox, sheep, dog, deer etc., have lost toes, many have lost part of their intestines, some have lost a part or the whole of one lung. Most vertebrates including man were derived from ancestors who once possessed—but lost—an eye on the back of the head. The whales and snakes have lost their legs and feet in whole or in part.
“You will not be surprised therefore to be told that the man of the second millennium began to be perceptibly changed from the one you knew in the 19th century. But when we come to the tenth millennium the change is astonishing. Let me describe him.
“His average height is eight inches less. His legs are short and spindling, his feet are small, and his toes reduced to small nubbins or mere warts. He has no teeth and the males and third sex people have not hair enough to make a scalp lock, even among the young, and it all disappears before middle age. The females however still maintain enough for a few bangs and spit curls. The external ears are reduced to a low rim of cartilage around the opening, about one inch in diameter. The lower part of the trunk is small and weak. The upper part containing the heart and lungs is, however, very well developed. The arms and hands are well formed strong and symmetrical. The head is very large indicating large mental power. All these deviations from the average man of your day became more pronounced with time, and if you could see a man of the one hundredth millennium you would have to inquire what it was. His stature now is but four feet, twelve inches of which is head, eighteen inches trunk, and the other eighteen inches legs. His chest is very broad, and very thick from front to back. His arms are stout and long enough to allow him to reach to his knees while standing. They are much larger and stronger than his legs. He is bald as an orange from birth. He has an immense mouth which he uses much in singing, laughing and speaking. He has not the vestige of an external ear nor any hair on any part of the body. No teeth of course and no sign of a toe. The foot is also much shortened and his walk is neither graceful nor vigorous. Foot ball is no longer his best hold, although his ancestor in your day may have belonged to the Sophomore foot ball eleven, of the Minnesota University. It would probably astonish you to see him eat. If not, it would be because you did not know what he was doing. His food is a liquid, an artificial preparation digested and assimilated ready for absorption by the tissues. He does not take it in at the mouth, but by an orifice leading into the abdomen. This orifice is in the position of the navel, and is the opening of the umbilical cord through the outer wall of the abdomen to its connection with the vascular system inside.
“In ancient times the umbilical cord through which the embryo received its nourishment became pinched off on the outside after birth, while the part of it that remained inside of the body cavity became reduced to a mere string, a useless rudiment. But now that inside piece is kept in use from birth, the child being fed in the same way after as before birth. This opening by hereditary habit has developed wonderful changes for which, however, the long ages of use have furnished ample time for adjustment into a perfect adaptation of the parts and functions concerned. But really the changes are by no means so radical as they seem at first view. The change made in the mode of life of a new infant is in reality the same in effect now that it was in your day. The essential operation in both cases is the introduction of nourishment into the blood and it is accomplished in both cases by osmosis. The history of this evolution is interesting, but I can give you only a bare outline of it.
“As the business of the world came to be done almost exclusively by machinery directed by men’s brains, there was but little use for muscular exertion, especially of the legs and body. The use for legs in locomotion was also superseded by artificial modes of conveyance. Every road and street in the world was as smooth and clean as a parlor floor. On these were unlimited facilities for inexpensive transportation, public and private, the power being electric. Besides these were the flyers, also public and private. The life became almost exclusively a sitting life, even when in motion, sedentary in the most literal sense. This was, however, accompanied by the most intense activity of the brain. These conditions were decidedly antagonistical to the old system of the nourishment of the body by the stomach and intestines, because that system had been developed in connection with an active muscular body, and could be kept in good health only by vigorous muscular activity. Formerly four-fifths of the blood went to support digestion and muscular activity, and one-fifth went to the brain to support the mind. Increasing mental activity diverted more and more of the circulation towards the brain, until now it consumes three-fifths, muscular work takes not quite two-fifths and digestion and assimilation almost none. The result of the changes that constantly pressed in this direction, was that the first millennium was an age of dyspepsia. The increasing disability of the stomach for digestion, encouraged the use of digested foods, and these by excusing the stomach from doing its proper work, increased its disability. Children at first were usually born with good stomachs, but these by middle life or before, commonly degenerated into instruments of misery. Finally they would not even tolerate digested food and it became necessary to convey food within by some other means. Any method by which the nutritious matter properly digested can be introduced into the blood will support life. It became necessary to adopt hypodermic injections and other similar expedients. As this sort of treatment had to be applied earlier and earlier in life as time went on, even in some cases in childhood and infancy, they finally hit on the plan of using the ancient natural entrance of the umbilicus and not allowing it to close at all during life. In this way the ancient system of support and nutrition for the body through the stomach has been entirely subverted. The chemical processes of digestion, selection and assimilation of food are all done outside of the body, by artificial processes, and the cavity of the body is no longer filled with a series of brewing vats, soap factories, gas works and receptacles for refuse filth and foul water. For we may truly say that digestion consists of processes of fermentation of several different kinds and saponification or soap making. Little or nothing that is now taken into the body requires to be excreted and the only excretory organs are the skin and lungs, for moisture and carbonic dioxide. This radical change was not all effected at once, but was extended over many generations, and was not fully consummated till the second millennium was well spent. But before that one was finished, the atrophy of the digestive functions was so far complete that cases of possible reversion to them were extremely rare. The people of the present time look back with amusement, commiseration and disgust upon the walking laboratories that constituted their ancestors.”
“I think,” said I, “that if the people of my day could see them the amusement would be mutual.”
“Probably it would,” he replied, “but if you should come to compare real advantages, I am of the opinion they would be entitled to laugh the loudest. They have decidedly the advantage of you in the simplicity of their construction and in their reduced liability to get out of order. An autopsy of this latter day man would reveal a little shriveled up bit of parchment in the place where the stomach used to be, and another in the place where the bladder was, a handful of shoe strings in the place of the intestines, the total reduced in length at least one-half; some little fleshy nodules like so many beans and peas and hickory nuts to stand for the kidneys, the pancreas, the spleen and that ancient terror, the liver. It is strange that after these organs are thus discarded and atrophied, nature continues to perpetuate the remembrance of them by reproducing in every individual that is born, these odd and grim caricatures, like a miserly old woman that carefully hoards her cellar full of old tin cans and broken jugs, bottles and dishes—of no use to anybody.—But this is nature’s way. Even in your day your scientists pointed out numerous remnants of played-out organs that your race then had about them, such as the coracoid bone, the tail bones, the vermiform appendix, the ear muscles, the pineal gland and many more. But now there are to be added, this fresh batch. They will be constantly reduced in size, one generation after another, but your race will hardly exist long enough to get rid of them entirely; but they may congratulate themselves that they have ended their mischief and are no longer functional.
“There are also notable changes in the skeleton of the present man. He no longer has 33 segments or vertebrae in his back bone as folks had in your day, but only 23. The seven neck and twelve dorsal segments remain the same, but the five lumbar vertebrae are reduced to two, the five sacral and four tail bones are reduced to one each, much diminished in size, the tail a mere button. So he is much shortened from the diaphragm down.”
“Professor,” said I, “I confess I am disappointed in this man of the latter days. It is doubtless true as you say that he has been greatly improved by getting rid of his troublesome insides. I was somewhat shocked when you first told me of it, but on reflection I have no doubt, that although it seemed at first so strange and unnatural, it was all for the best. But his stature—I cannot get over that. He is nothing but a big headed spindle shanked dwarf. Our dreamers and prophets of the nineteenth century always pictured the coming man to us as a Hercules with brawny limbs and muscles of steel; he was never to be less than six feet high, and he was to be as graceful as he was powerful and all that. He was to be intellectual, too, of course; a Daniel Webster in brain. And they seemed to have the experience of the race in their favor in this prognostication, because it does not appear that the average stature of the race diminished any, but probably increased, during the 4,000 or 5,000 years before the 20th century. Now if it did not decrease for that period, why should it in the periods following?”
“During the 4,000 years or more you refer to, the conditions of life on which stature depend, did not materially change, for which reason stature did not. War and field exercises, tend to large stature. Sedentary employments, tend to reduce the stature. The latter mode of life has prevailed for 100,000 years, and besides the general causes there has been the additional special one in this case, of the loss of function in a considerable portion of the trunk which would of consequence lose size in an increased proportion.
“But after all it is not physical stature that commands respect, but mental stature. Many of your greatest men have been of small stature. You speedily forget one’s size when attending to the actions of his mind. The most dignified presence is that which impresses itself as the strongest mentally. We consider that to which we are accustomed, as the most correct and proper, in stature as in everything else. If you had been most accustomed to people four feet high, you would regard six feet people as coarse unwieldy overgrown monsters, and when you become accustomed to the people of these times with their gentleness patience, industry, unselfishness, sympathy and kindness and unfailing good humor, their ability ingenuity, almost divine wisdom and learning, their stature and form will be transformed before you to become your standard of perfection. In the abstract, that is the most perfect form that admits of the accomplishment of the greatest ends. By this standard the man of this latter day is far in advance of all that preceded him, because in no other human form would it ever have been possible to properly sustain so great a brain.
“It may interest you to know that the latter day man has almost entirely lost the sense of taste, the sense of smell was already much decayed in your day. It is somewhat poorer now, but still fairly good. The sense of touch is far more delicate than formerly, hearing equally good, and sight better for near objects, but not so good for far ones. The telepathic sense has been remarkably developed and is one of the subjects of study and drill in the schools. The adult people of the third sex wear hats ten inches in diameter. The heads of the other sexes are somewhat smaller. The longevity of the race has increased to an average of 200 years, some occasionally reaching 300. The cause of this is due in part to the greater purity of their food and the smaller quantity of mineral impurities, such as lime, that is allowed to clog up the tissues and vitiate the circulation.”
