Certain Personal MattersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
Certain Personal Matters
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946
Then in the physiology of these children of men, with their expanding
brains, their great sensitive hands and diminishing bodies, great
changes were necessarily worked. "We see now," says the Professor, "in
the more intellectual sections of humanity an increasing sensitiveness
to stimulants, a growing inability to grapple with such a matter as
alcohol, for instance. No longer can men drink a bottleful of port; some
cannot drink tea; it is too exciting for their highly-wrought nervous
systems. The process will go on, and the Sir Wilfrid Lawson of some near
generation may find it his duty and pleasure to make the silvery spray
of his wisdom tintinnabulate against the tea-tray. These facts lead
naturally to the comprehension of others. Fresh raw meat was once a dish
for a king. Now refined persons scarcely touch meat unless it is
cunningly disguised. Again, consider the case of turnips; the raw root
is now a thing almost uneatable, but once upon a time a turnip must have
been a rare and fortunate find, to be torn up with delirious eagerness
and devoured in ecstasy. The time will come when the change will affect
all the other fruits of the earth. Even now, only the young of mankind
eat apples raw--the young always preserving ancestral characteristics
after their disappearance in the adult. Some day even boys will regard
apples without emotion. The boy of the future, one must believe, will
gaze on an apple with the same unspeculative languor with which he now
regards a flint"--in the absence of a cat.
"Furthermore, fresh chemical discoveries came into action as modifying
influences upon men. In the prehistoric period even, man's mouth had
ceased to be an instrument for grasping food; it is still growing
continually less prehensile, his front teeth are smaller, his lips
thinner and less muscular; he has a new organ, a mandible not of
irreparable tissue, but of bone and steel--a knife and fork. There is no
reason why things should stop at partial artificial division thus
afforded; there is every reason, on the contrary, to believe my
statement that some cunning exterior mechanism will presently masticate
and insalivate his dinner, relieve his diminishing salivary glands and
teeth, and at last altogether abolish them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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