It may be this. Some one asked the giraffe why his neck was long. He replied: Because the distance from head to body is great. I read because the distance from birth to death is great. Some way, it has to be filled in. I wish now I knew those beautifully written tongues of the Orient, which scribes of old traced upon vellum, ribbon-books of Persia, the things hidden in alphabets which are lovely to the eye. I have seen pictures of Persian calligraphers as enchanting as paintings. Hand writing, as art, is dead. It belongs to the past. Perhaps sometime printed books will be just as dead, and replaced by something else, some diminutive form of moving-picture, some mechanical device attached to the head which will tell stories aloud for the ear, in the manner of a graphophone, and reflect them in pictures upon a paper fan. When we fly around the world in twenty-four hours, we can not waste time in anything so slow, old-fashioned, as reading. Taste will be perverted until something new is made. Something new will always be made. The possibilities of science are like time, endless. Perhaps nothing lovelier will be made for an older generation. But something new is sure to be. In twenty years there will be few book shops. Talking about stylists, there are none that surpass the scientists. They have accuracy. They have economical fitting of word to thought, leaving no surplussage, shortage. I read them partly for this. Changes are near. We are poised on edge of the old. It will not be long before man will live centuries, instead of a few paltry years. Then his brain will change more. It will make discards for the long game ahead. In the length of time I have lived, I can see the human skull is different. Its tendency is to grow higher above the ears, broader in front, shorter in length toward the rear. One of the things being discarded is _fear_. Sympathy, many old exquisitenesses, went long ago. Fear would be bad baggage to carry in the prodigious transportation feats of the future, when man sets out to make week-end visits to the stars, look in upon Mars, shake hands with Madam Venus. Imagination, of the artistic kind, a kind of bastard first cousin of fear, will be eliminated. Imagination is practically gone now. Fact will so surpass it, it will be useless. It will be a kindergarten pupil in the school of kings.