their eyes shut. Thats
their notion of science.

SAVVY. Steady, Nunk! Hold the fort.

CONRAD [_growls and sits down_]!!!

LUBIN. You volunteered the consultation, Doctor. I may tell you that,
far from sharing the credulity as to science which is now the fashion, I
am prepared to demonstrate that during the last fifty years, though the
Church has often been wrong, and even the Liberal Party has not been
infallible, the men of science have always been wrong.

CONRAD. Yes: the fellows you call men of science. The people who make
money by it, and their medical hangers-on. But has anybody been right?

LUBIN. The poets and story tellers, especially the classical poets and
story tellers, have been, in the main, right. I will ask you not
to repeat this as my opinion outside; for the vote of the medical
profession and its worshippers is not to be trifled with.

FRANKLYN. You are quite right: the poem is our real clue to biological
science. The most scientific document we possess at present is, as your
grandmother would have told you quite truly, the story of the Garden of
Eden.

BURGE [_pricking up his ears_] Whats that? If you can establish that,
Barnabas, I am prepared to hear you out with my very best attention. I
am listening. Go on.

FRANKLYN. Well, you remember, don't you, that in the Garden of Eden Adam
and Eve were not created mortal, and that natural death, as we call it,
was not a part of life, but a later and quite separate invention?

SURGE. Now you mention it, thats true. Death came afterwards.

LUBIN. What about accidental death? That was always possible.

FRANKLYN. Precisely. Adam and Eve were hung up between two frightful
possibilities. One was the extinction of mankind by their accidental
death. The other was the prospect of living for ever. They could bear
neither. They decided that they would just take a short turn of a
thousand years, and meanwhile hand on their work to a new pair.
Consequently, they had to invent natural birth and natural death, which
are, after all, only modes of perpetuating life without putting on any
single creature the terrible burden of immortality.

LUBIN. I see. The old must make room for the new.

SURGE. Death is nothing but making room. Thats all there is in it or
ever has been in it.

FRANKLYN. Yes; but the old must not desert their posts until the new are
ripe for them. They desert them now two hundred years too soon.

SAVVY. I believe the old people are the new