reading-desk; thus would his long fingers have rustled these dry
papers.)

"Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him. . . .

"The old habitual life of man is breaking up all about us, and for
the new life our minds, our imaginations, our habits and customs are
all unprepared. . . .

"It is only now, after some years of study and living, that I begin
to realize what this tremendous beginning we call Science means to
mankind. Every condition that once justified the rules and
imperatives, the manners and customs, the sentiments, the morality,
the laws and limitations which make up the common life, has been or
is being destroyed. . . . Two or three hundred years more and all
that life will be as much a thing past and done with as the life
that was lived in the age of unpolished stone. . . .

"Man is leaving his ancestral shelters and going out upon the
greatest adventure that ever was in space or time, he is doing it
now, he is doing it in us as I stand here and read to you."



CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN