Humanity had tended towards unity, one race, one language, one general government, one religion. There were no more state religions; only the voice of an enlightened conscience, and in this unity former anthropological differences had disappeared. In former ages poets had prophesied that in the marvellous progress of things man would finally acquire wings, and fly through the air by his muscular force alone; but they had not studied the origin of anthropomorphic structure and had forgotten that for a man to have at the same time arms and wings, he must belong to a zoölogical order of sextupeds which does not exist on our planet; for man belongs to the quadrupeds, a type which has been gradually modified. But though he had not acquired new natural organs, he had acquired artificial ones, to say nothing of his physical transformation. He had conquered the region of the air and could soar in the sky by light apparatus, whose motor power was electricity, and the atmosphere had become his domain as it had been that of the birds. It is very probable that if in the course of ages a winged race could have acquired, by the development of its faculties of observation, a brain analogous to that of even the most primitive man, it would have soon dominated the human species and replaced it by a new one,—a winged race of the same zoölogical type as the quadrupeds and bipeds. But the force of gravity is an obstacle to any such organic development of the winged species, and humanity, grown more perfect, had remained master of the world. At the same time, in the lapse of ages, the animal population of the globe had completely changed. The wild species, lions, tigers, hyenas, panthers, elephants, giraffes, kangaroos, as also whales and seals, had become extinct. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. [Illustration] About the one hundredth century of the Christian era all resemblance between the human race and monkeys had disappeared. The nervous sensibility of man had become intensified to a marvellous degree. The sense of sight, of hearing, of smell, of touch, and of taste, had gradually acquired a delicacy far exceeding that of their earlier and grosser manifestations. Through the study of the electrical properties of living organisms, a seventh sense, the electric sense, was created outright, so to speak; and everyone possessed the power of attracting and repelling both living and inert matter, to a degree depending upon the temperament of the individual. But by far the most important of all the senses, the one which played the greatest role in men’s relation to each other, was the eighth, the psychic sense, by which communication at a distance became possible.