nikoff. He regards the human stomach and large
intestine as not only vestigial and superfluous in the human economy,
but as positively dangerous on account of the harbour they afford for
those bacteria that accelerate the decay of age. He proposes that these
viscera should be removed. To a layman like myself this is an altogether
astounding and horrifying idea, but Doctor Metchnikoff is a man of the
very greatest scientific reputation, and it does not give him any qualm
of horror or absurdity to advance it. I am quite sure that if a
gentleman called upon me "done up" in the way I am dimly suggesting,
with most of the contents of his abdomen excavated, his lungs and heart
probably enlarged and improved, parts of his brain removed to eliminate
harmful tendencies and make room for the expansion of the remainder, his
mind and sensibilities increased, and his liability to fatigue and the
need of sleep abolished, I should conceal with the utmost difficulty my
inexpressible disgust and terror. But, then, if M. Bleriot, with his
flying machine, ear-flaps and goggles, had soared down in the year 54
B.C., let us say, upon my woad-adorned ancestors--every family man in
Britain was my ancestor in those days--at Dover, they would have had
entirely similar emotions. And at present I am not discussing what is
beautiful in humanity, but what is possible--and what, being possible,
is likely to be attempted.

It does not follow that because men will some day have this enormous
power over themselves, physically and mentally, that they will
necessarily make themselves horrible--even by our present standards
quite a lot of us would be all the slenderer and more active and
graceful for "Metchnikoffing"--nor does surgery exhaust the available
methods. We are still in the barbaric age, so far as our use of food and
drugs is concerned. We stuff all sorts of substances into our
unfortunate interiors and blunder upon the most various consequences.
Few people of three score and ten but have spent in the aggregate the
best part of a year in a state of indigestion, stupid, angry or painful
indigestion as the case may be. No one would be so careless and ignorant
about the fuel he burnt in his motor-car as most of us are about the
fuel we burn in our bodies. And there are all sort of stimulating and
exhilarating things, digesting things, fatigue-suppressing things,
exercise economising things, we dare not use because we are afraid of
our ignorance of