It is probable that only our ignorance prevents us from building up protoplasm, but that we shall require rapidly increasing amounts of time for each successive stage of evolution. This will certainly be the case when we have reached organisms which can only be rendered more complex by controlling their environment while they reproduce themselves for many generations. A higher organism cannot be built up directly; the molecular arrangements in its body can only be reached through the synthesis of some simple form of life which must then be allowed to evolve through countless generations. Organic heredity resides in molecular patterns which can only be built up by this very slow process of repeated reproduction. Thus it is _shortage of time_ that our ambitious scientist is up against in his haste to create a homunculus. Only the synthetic alchemy of time can build up organisms, each bearing within itself a long heredity. The estimates given for the minimum time required in each case are about a thousandth of the actual time taken in a laboratory experiment or in the history of evolution as known from geological records. It may have taken a million years or more for the first mobile cells to have developed from inorganic materials and a thousand million years for the mammals. Yet perhaps these processes might have gone on more quickly. The times given are mere suggestions of a minimum time which may be necessary under ideal conditions. We waste a lot of time adjusting the apparatus in a laboratory experiment, and in evolution there may have been stationary periods with little or no new development. But it seems likely that when we know more about it we shall discover that a certain time is required for the formation of organic systems of given complexity. In this sense we may say that then human spermatozoon and ovum carry within them the synthesis of at least a million years. Only an International Institute of Evolutionary Research under the most stable of Leagues of Nations could hope to create an artificial man, and even then man could hardly take the credit, for Time would have done more than man. But with sufficient consistency of purpose man could do this, provided he learnt how to make use of every moment of the creative power of time, and never made a slip by which the accumulated treasure of the years (i.e. heredity) might be broken. How man would learn to value life, and how profoundly such an experiment might alter his view of human beings, each one a priceless miracle, fruit of a million years!