The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9

nearly every life-community. Perhaps no

man has yet imagined what a forest may -

some day be, a forest of great trees without disease, free of stinging insect or vindictive reptile, open, varied and delightful. The wilderness will become a world-garden and the desert a lonely resort for contemplation and mental refreshment. An enormous range of possibility in the selective breeding of plants and animals still remains to be explored. One may doubt the need to exterminate even the wolf and tiger. The tiger may cease to be the enemy of man and his cattle ; the wolf, bred and subdued, may crouch at his feet.

Consider what man has learnt to do with plants—quite apart from mere selective breeding, the picking and approving of Nature’s creative experiments. Muse for a moment on the idea of a graft. A bit of one kind of plant is joined, welded, one flesh with another. A thoroughly unnatural thing which never happened before the human cultivator appeared is brought into existence. Or think of the astonishing graft-hybrids ; the living skin of a lemon tree enclosing the middle of an orange tree, growing together, one flesh.

It is perfectly possible that man will do these things with animal bodies in the near future. Already he is learning to handle the difficult, delicate material. The tissue cultivator takes bits of muscle or nerve or kidney and grows them for years in his incubators, quite isolated from the rest of the body. The plastic surgeon cuts a splint from the tibia and welds it into a broken lower jaw, or takes skin from the buttocks to mould an eyelid. Soon we shall be doing much more tremendous surgeries. It may even prove possible to operate directly on the germ-plasm, for the geneticist can already produce mutations by means of X-rays. Man has conquered the hardness of steel ; he cuts and twists it and builds with it

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 2

as he pleases ; to-day he is learning a new art, with living protoplasm as his medium. A quality of fantasia comes into our writing as we follow up these possibilities. Yet it was not fantasy but hard fact that brought us to this point. Arising out of the thought and effort of to-day, it is plain that human achievement marches on to fresh powers and fresh vistas—until our utmost imagination is strained and exhausted. We are dazzled by the conquests we deduce ; we laugh; our minds gasp like newborn children when they first meet the free air. And will the personal life in these coming ages of man’s complete ascendancy be as happy and exciting as it can be to-day? In that great age the subordination of self will certainly play a part. But the subordination of self is not by any means the same as self-sacrifice. ‘The individual life may be infinitely richer as a part than as a whole ; the whole sustains and inspires its members ; experiences we cannot dream of may le before our descendants. Great and wonderful and continually expanding experiences lie before life, intensities of feelmg and happiness we shall never share, and marvels that we shall never see. Yet we need not enyy that ampler life. With a necessary but quite practicable effort of self-control and selfsubordination it has been possible for many of us, in our own time, within our phase and in our measure, to live intensely interested and happy individual lives. Even to those to whom the scheme of things has turned an adverse face, courage can give its own high and stern satisfactions. For the stoicism of the scientific worker at any rate, there can be no complete defeat. And these mightier experiences and joys of the race to come will be in a sense ours, they will be consequence and fulfilment of our own joys and experiences, and a part, as we are a part, of the conscious growth of life, for which no man can certainly foretell either a limit or an end,