But before we proceed to prophecy I should like to turn back to the past and examine very briefly the half dozen or so important biological inventions which have already been made. By a biological invention I mean the establishment of a new relationship between man and other animals or plants, or between different human beings, provided that such relationship is one which comes primarily under the domain of biology rather than physics, psychology or ethics. Of the biological inventions of the past, four were made before the dawn of history. I refer to the domestication of animals, the domestication of plants, the domestication of fungi for the production of alcohol, and to a fourth invention, which I believe was of more ultimate and far-reaching importance than any of these, since it altered the path of sexual selection, focussed the attention of man as a lover upon woman’s face and breasts, and changed our idea of beauty from the steatopygous Hottentot to the modern European, from the Venus of Brassempouy to the Venus of Milo. There are certain races which have not yet made this last invention. And in our own day two more have been made, namely bactericide and the artificial control of conception. The first point that we may notice about these inventions is that they have all had a profound emotional and ethical effect. Of the four earlier there is not one which has not formed the basis of a religion. I do not know what strange god will have the hardihood to adopt Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in the place of Triptolemus and Noah, but one may remark that it is impossible to keep religion out of any discussion of the practices which they popularized. The second point is perhaps harder to express. The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which had not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural. Consider so simple and time-honoured a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions, in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow.[2]