_THE COMING OF THE AMAZONS_ THE COMING OF THE AMAZONS A SATIRISTIC SPECULATION ON THE SCIENTIFIC FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION BY OWEN JOHNSON AUTHOR OF “SACRIFICE,” ETC. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. NEW YORK · TORONTO 1931 JOHNSON THE COMING OF THE AMAZONS COPYRIGHT · 1931 BY OWEN JOHNSON First edition October 1931 Reprinted October 1931 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA _To_ HARRIE T. LINDEBERG PREFACE It is now one week since the termination of the extraordinary adventure which happened to me in this, the third week in November 1929. Every detail, even to the least conversation is clear in my memory as I start to set down my strange revelation. I, John Bogardus, graduate of Harvard and Oxford, descendant of a virile patroon ancestry, now in my thirty-second year make this record, that my fellow men, at present supinely indifferent to the alarming portent of the feminist uprising, may perceive before it is too late, the hideous catastrophe toward which in the relentless war of the sexes we are blindly drifting. On the fifteenth of November I had sought refuge at my club in the company of my old friend Dr. Sachaloff, a biologist in the ---- Foundation, whose propensity to think out loud had proved exceedingly irritating to the mediocrity of his associates. We had lunched and wined in a manner befitting the cellar inherited from my paternal grandfather, and luncheon over, the conversation had run along lines of scientific speculation into the future of society and the possibilities of the prolongation of life. Dr. Sachaloff, sure of my confidence, had permitted his imagination the unpardonable scientific liberty of prophecy. He declared that while the complete conquest of the natural processes of decay must still be regarded as an impossibility, still, with the elimination of present scourges and a fuller control of the glandular sources of energy, _theoretically_ (a word which he pronounced with deliberate emphasis) the span of life might eventually be prolonged from two to three hundred years. However, he qualified this audacity by adding that the birth of new diseases must be reckoned with. I immediately broached an idea which had been long in my mind. “If,” I began eagerly, “organic bodies can be kept long periods free from decomposition by freezing processes and human beings thrown into a cataleptic state which so nearly resembles death as to defy the acutest observer, why couldn’t a man by some induced hypnotic catalepsy be then subjected to an intense refrigeration and kept alive in cold storage over a long period of years?” “Port like this,” said Dr. Sachaloff raising his glass to the light, “is a great stimulation to the imagination.” “Come now--” I replied with a wheedling smile, “in a mood of pure speculation?” “Do you want to have me deported from the country, John?”