ng with transcendent,
potential unborn men and women, and his brain grew numb with the
effort and his heart humble with the moments' prophetic glance. Ay, it
was true! He in his turn would seem a child of the foolish past--a
fond old man to the wise future. His complacence was lost. His faith
in his authorities violently shaken. He recalled a line from Whitman:
"Beyond every victory there are other battles to be fought, other
victories to be won." And his eyes grew dim and his thought filled
with reverence for those seers of the future, and with awe of the
inscrutable and ever-beckoning and ever-retiring mystery of life.

His chief resumed: "No, we pretend to larger knowledge of living
organisms; but how will our text-books be regarded by the teachers of
the future? Will they not read us and smile over us as curious
mixtures of truth and error--valuable as showing the state of science
in our day? Do you dream of solving the mystery of life? Of bridging
the chasm between the crystal and the non-nucleated cell? I do not. As
I sat alone last night unable to sleep, my eyes ran over the backs of
the books on my shelves--they were all there, all the great ones,
Laplace, Spinoza, Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, Hegel, Kant, Darwin, all
the wonder-workers. How masterful each had been in his time. How
complacent of praise; how critical of the past! But here now they all
stood gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers
of the next century fold me up and put me away beside the other mouldy
ones--curious but no longer useful. My book will be but an empty shell
on the reef of human history. Of such cruelty are the makers of
scientific advance."

Morton was profoundly moved by the note of pathos, of disillusionment
in the old man's voice. "Would you have me believe that these men we
doubt to-day are forerunners of the future?"

"I feel so. The materialists have had their day. Some subtler
expression of matter is about to be given to the world, not as Kant
gave it, but through experiment, and to men like Myers and Sir William
Crookes may come great honor some day."

"You would not have us weaken in our method?"

Weissmann's manner changed. He resumed his most peremptory tone. "By
no means. We must not relax our vigilant scrutiny of fact one atom's
weight, but we must keep our minds open to new messages--no matter how
repulsive the source."

Morton sat for a moment in deep study, then said: "If I fail to stop
th