Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the
environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power
from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will
cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and
more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter
of energy on his own account. So that, if the _homo sapiens_ of the
future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we
not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of
beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a
fanciful friend make a still further advance in this "new-man"
direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form
from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or
half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin
can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go,
along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging even
more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our
crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible
little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will
constitute our most congenial occupation.
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