living machines
he used in furthering his ambitions and desires. So it was not long
before he learned much about old Newton Hallowell--and began to admire
him--and with a man of Norman's temperament to admire is to like.

He had assumed at the outset that the scientist was more or less the
crank. He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that,
far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and
well-balanced mentality--a genius. The day came when, Dorothy not having
returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking
with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas
unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to
soaring.

Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize
what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly. We know little
about ourselves, less about others. We fancy that the world and the
human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be.
History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional
acceptance as truth. As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the
continuation of just what we see about us in the present. Norman,
practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an
imagination. He thought Hallowell a kind of fool for thinking only of
the future and working only for it--but he soon came to think him n
divine fool. And through Hallowell's spectacles he was charmed for many
an hour with visions of the world that is to be when, in the slow but
steady processes of evolution, the human race will become intelligent,
will conquer the universe with the weapons of science and will make it
over.

When he first stated his projects to Norman, the young man had
difficulty in restraining his amusement. A new idea, in any line of
thought with which we are not familiar, always strikes us as ridiculous.
Norman had been educated in the ignorant conventional way still in high
repute among the vulgar and among those whose chief delight is to make
the vulgar gape in awe. He therefore had no science, that is, no
knowledge--outside his profession--but only what is called learning,
though tommyrot would be a fitter name for it. He had only the most
meager acquaintance with that great fundamental of a sound and sane
education, embryology. He knew nothing of what science had already done
to destroy all the still current notions about the mystery of life and
b