probability looms with almost the certainty of a syllogistic
deduction, that such will be the outcome to our hundreds of thousands
of years of pain upon earth. In the face of that, speculations upon
a comet or gaseous emanations hitting the planet, or the sun growing
cold, become babyish fancies. How clearly the possibility is pointed
in the discussions about the use in the next War of bacterial bombs
containing the bacilli of cholera, plague, dysentery and many others!
What influenza did in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand
times and ten thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring
forth, of which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting
at long distance, upon huge masses and over any extent of territory,
is presaged in that single example. But besides thus willing, by an
inner necessity, its own annihilation, Life, in the very structure
and machinery of its being, seems caught into the entanglements of an
inescapable net, an eternity-long bondage it can never rip, to flee
and remake itself into the immortal image that is its God.

And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable
optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop
of comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest
prospect of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future
and destiny, there are others. Man, after all, may be simply a bad
habit Life will succeed in shaking off. No philosophy or religion can
afford to be anthropocentric merely. It must include all life and all
living things to which we are blood-related. There are other species
or latent species to take up the torch that burned poor homo sapiens
and ascend the heights. The ant and bee may yet mutate along certain
lines that would make them the masters of the universe.

But no matter what species or variety gets the upper hand in the