In twenty years’ time scientific knowledge will be adequate for the beginning of this giant task, and we shall be subscribing our guineas for the foundation of the Institute. Time has created man; man may use time to create man once more. With a million years ahead of us before we reach the sensitive mammals, we need hardly fear criticism from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. We are simply going to allow life to evolve itself under ideal conditions with Switzerland as the State for Evolutionary Research. It may happen that under such perfect conditions life will evolve more swiftly than it did on this rough-and-ready planet. But equally well we--or rather our descendants--may find that the Darwinian struggle for survival is essential for evolution, and then the nations would have to debate on the morals of reproducing the ‘cruelty of nature’ inside the World’s Evolutionary Zoo. Perhaps a wrathful god will seek to punish mankind for attempting to build this ladder to the secret of life, this modern Tower of Babel, and amuse himself by watching the community of scientists stricken by a plague of inconsistency amongst their weights and measures. The possibilities of such grand schemes have to be taken seriously. We are now highly self-conscious beings with a tremendous technique for research. Men with genuine creative imagination who reverence life must shoulder the responsibilities of the twentieth-century consciousness, and use scientific technique for creative not life-destroying purposes. One can imagine a growing fraction of the interest now given to war, other people’s adultery, and greyhound racing, turned towards Switzerland, whence at critical moments wireless bulletins would announce that the first amoeba had just successfully taken nourishment. If we wish it, the future of science can be such as to recompense for its recent occupation with gunpowder. Governments would be powerless to make war if the physicists refused to make the guns and the Royal Society called upon scientists to go on strike until each war crisis had been settled by arbitration. The problem of life may be seen in a new light if the speculations of the last section are accepted and we assume that a definite period of time is necessary for the building up of any living organism. For if this is so the laws which govern life must involve the age of the organism since some definite moment in its history. We might choose for this moment the instant when the parent spermatozoon entered the ovum in the case of a higher organism, or in the evolutionary experiment just described the age might be reckoned from the moment when the first elementary chemicals were combined into molecules. The point is that this whole evolutionary process must be described by laws which take into account the age of the system under consideration.