ploughshare. In that day time icebergs will come crunching against
our proudest cities, razing them from off the face of the earth as
though they were made of rotten blotting-paper. There is no respect
now of Handel nor of Shakespeare; the works of Rembrandt and Bellini
fossilise at the bottom of the sea. Grace, beauty, and wit, all that
is precious in music, literature, and art--all gone. In the morning
there was Europe. In the evening there are no more populous cities
nor busy hum of men, but a sea of jagged ice, a lurid sunset, and the
doom of many ages. Then shall a scared remnant escape in places, and
settle upon the changed continent when the waters have subsided--a
simple people, busy hunting shellfish on the drying ocean beds, and
with little time for introspection yet they can read and write and
sum, for by that time these accomplishments will have become
universal, and will be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk;
but they do so as a matter of course, and without self-consciousness.
Also they make the simpler kinds of machinery too easily to be able
to follow their own operations--the manner of their own
apprenticeship being to them as a buried city. May we not imagine
that, after the lapse of another ten thousand years or so, some one
of them may again become cursed with lust of introspection, and a
second Harvey may astonish the world by discovering that it can read
and write, and that steam-engines do not grow, but are made? It may
be safely prophesied that he will die a martyr, and be honoured in
the fourth generation.



CHAPTER IV--APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES TO ACTIONS AND
HABITS ACQUIRED BEFORE BIRTH