with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and
lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth
and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as
his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening,
continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once
gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous
corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with.
You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The
psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove bad
complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden ideas.
So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting what we
have learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the racial wisdom,
science, gather power continually to subdue the individual man to its
own end. Is that not so?'

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new
work that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is it with
heredity?' asked Karenin.

Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged by
the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of
inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many of
the parental qualities could be determined.

'He can actually DO----?'

'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said Fowler, 'but
to-morrow it will be practicable.'

'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and Edith,
'while we have been theorising about men and women, here is science
getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman is
too much for us, we'll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like
any type of men and women, we'll have no more of it. These old bodies,
these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon
from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel
like that--like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its
wings. Because where do these things take us?'

'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.

'No,' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth that made
us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no longer
chained to us like the ball of a galley slave....

'In a little while men who will know how to bear the stran