60 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the mind of a man who spends year after year pointing pins ! It may 

 be well to inquire as to whether or not the social and business frame- 

 work of society is not doing much to reduce some of its members to a 

 state little better than monomania. 



To enforce the lesson taught by the Law of Differences we will 

 pass by a million years, while I give the reader a picture of the recon- 

 structed universe. It had been reformed to that degree that the wild- 

 est dream of the idealist had been realized. Desiring to have one 

 more look at the old homestead, I came back from spirit-land, was 

 " materialized," and once more walked the solid earth as w T as my wont 

 a million years before. I need not say I was not quite up to the 

 times. The first thing I noticed was that my physical geography was 

 all at fault. There were no burning sands, no icy wastes, no earth- 

 quake, no tornado, no flood, no drought. The whole earth from pole 

 to pole was on the golden-age pattern. In this respect, desire 

 was satisfied. For centuries no one had been heard to complain of 

 any imperfection. All was lovely. To me, with a recollection of 

 what I had suffered in my youth in cold and barren New England 

 ten in the family, and all big eaters the change was delightful. But 

 what was my surprise not to find a single soul to share my pleasure ! 

 When I talked to those I met of their beautiful world, I spoke in 

 an unknown tongue. I might as well have tried to convince Jones, 

 the druggist, that pure air was as fragrant as the odors which blew 

 from Araby the blest, or any other Araby. Jones would have told 

 me, " I have had air in my nose for fifty years, and, if there is any 

 smell in it, don't you suppose I should have found it out in that 

 time ? " They were as stolid as marble, and as unenthusiastic as a 

 proper woman who never felt the slightest twinge of hope, fear, love, 

 hate, or anything else, except propriety. " It is strange," said I, 

 " that no one understands what I feel. . . . Well," I thought, "they 

 have never known anything different, and as a result they do not 

 know this." 



I was no less agreeably surprised at the men and women whom I 

 found peopling the globe. The stirpiculturist had finished his work 

 and gone home. There was not a physical deformity of any kind 

 among the millions that walked the earth. All were brought up to 

 the highest type of physical beauty. There was not a woman I met 

 with whom I did not instantly fall in love, though it was like Cali- 

 ban falling in love with the houris. Every man was an Apollo, and 

 every woman a Venus. But I was surprised to see them so blind to 

 each other's charms. The men were the slowest of slow lovers; the 

 women as responsive as lay-figures. "Ah ! well," I sighed, " they never 

 saw in man or in woman anything but beauty, and now they see not 

 that." It seemed that a sight of me, which some of them could not en- 

 dure without a shudder, had begun to awaken in them a new sense of 

 which the stirpiculturist had robbed them a sense of the beautiful. 



