The great beauty which animal and bird life lends to the earth is doomed to lessen and disappear. The automatic vehicle will render the horse useless; and he will be considered too costly, and too slow, to be kept even as a gambling toy. The dog will have no place in a world which has no gratitude for such simple sincerity and faithful friendliness as he offers. When wool, and horn, and leather, and meat foods have been replaced by chemical inventions, cattle and sheep will have no more tolerance than the wild buffalo has had in the United States. What are now classed as big game will be exterminated in Asia and Africa, and already in Europe we are told that the pleasure it affords to people to kill them is the sole reason why stags, foxes, and gamebirds are allowed to exist and multiply under artificial protection. All the charm which the races of 'fur and feather' lend to the earth will be lost for ever; for a type destroyed can never be recalled. Every invention of what is called science takes the human race farther and farther from nature, nearer and nearer to an artificial, unnatural and dependent state. One seems to hear the laugh of Goethe's Mephistopheles behind the hiss of steam; and in the tinkle of the electric bell there lurks the chuckle of glee with which the Tempter sees the human fools take as a boon and a triumph the fatal gifts he has given. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What shall it profit the world to put a girdle about its loins in forty minutes when it shall have become a desert of stone, a wilderness of streets, a treeless waste, a songless city, where man shall have destroyed all life except his own, and can hear no echo of his heart's pulsation save in the throb of an iron piston.