“The race is all, Pennell,” I hear him say again. “We of this age, who pride ourselves on our accomplishments, are only emerging from the dawn of civilization. We are still encumbered with all the ghostly fears that obsessed our ancestors of the Stone Age. But others will build the Temple of Truth upon the foundations that we are rearing. Oh, if I could have been born a hundred years ahead! For the change is coming fast, Pennell!” And, when I professed to doubt the nearness of that change: “If your frontal area varied by only five centimeters, Pennell, you would believe. That is your tragedy, to fall short of the human norm by five centimeters of missing forehead.” I can see his well-proportioned figure, and the mane of black hair thrown back; the flashing eyes. Animated by religious impulse, Lazaroff would have gone to the stake as unconcernedly as he would certainly have burned others. He had invented a system of craniometry by which he professed to discover the mentality of his subject, and I was his first. Certainly the conditions were ideal for our work. We were both young men, enthusiasts; and Sir Spofforth Moore, our chief, was nearing eighty. The Trustees had picked him for the post because of his great name in the medical world. He was an ideal chief. He interfered with us no more than the Trustees did. He asked for no results. The Institute existed only for patient research. Yes, the millionaire had certainly displayed imagination for a millionaire, and it was fortunate that he died before his hobby, whose inception came to him, I believe, from reading sensational newspaper articles, grew into an obsession. The Trustees refused to accept Sir Spofforth’s resignation when he became infirm. He lent the Institute dignity and prestige. I doubt whether he knew much of Mendelism, or had followed the work of the past five years. He knew little of what we were doing, and initialed our vouchers without ever demurring. Of course he tried to keep in touch with us, and I will confess that our routine work was mainly a cover for the daring plan that Lazaroff had, bit by bit, outlined to me. “You see, Pennell,” he explained in self-justification, “the work must be done. And where are there such opportunities as here? Science cannot be bound by the provisions of a dead man’s deed. It is not likely that Sir Spofforth would object, either, but the Trustees might have intelligence enough to pick up the idea from the quarterly reports if we were entirely frank, and a biologist with imagination is called a charlatan. And we must work quickly, while we have this chance. When Sir Spofforth dies the Trustees will probably pick some fussy little busybody who will want to poke his nose into everything and take personal charge. Then—what of our experiment?” The idea aroused me to as much enthusiasm as Lazaroff. And yet there was disappointment in the knowledge that we should never know the results of it.