There will not be need of fiction, nor fiction writers, when Science gets booted, spurred, ready for conquest. Fiction writers belong to the world’s generously believing childhood. Its mature, reasoning manhood is here. The simplest fact of Science will dim the shabby glamour of romance. It will put out its light, as the sun puts out the stars. Ah—the stories Science will tell! Science will unravel the long adventurous past of the lily, the rose, the orchid, the story of which will be unfolded logically from cells. The memories of the rose, the meditations of the lily, the pensive regrets of the violet, in days of the future, will make novels like Jack the Giant Killer, again children’s toys. People are losing interest in novel-reading. And the stage is dead. I have watched it gradually grow weak year by year. Great novels and great plays are not being written. One of the causes of new writing, both verse and prose, is merely exhibition of disintegration. It is one more dropped stitch in the past. The rock is crumbling to sand. The inescapable alternating progression of the ages is at work visibly. The speech of primitive peoples was monolithic. They hurled at each other boulders of uncut thought. From crumbling boulders, prepositions, conjunctions, tiny connective sand-like particles out of which we have made what we call speech was born. Even written Latin was blocks of uncompromising marble, in comparison with our written word. Science will give power to look down vistas of time. It will poise us upon unthinkable heights. Perhaps too we shall learn to unchain the soul, then make it obedient messenger until it flies, Mercury like, through dead, forgotten days. Each human being will be his own novel. There can be nothing superior. There will be neither great nor little. We shall see, then talk at the same time, with friends on the other side of the globe, sitting comfortably in an easy chair. And perhaps upon other globes, across space! We shall live lonely lives of terrific cerebral power, which will change even shape of the skull, until to man of today we would look stranger than Martians. We are near that surprising future. In Metchnikow’s _Prolongation of Life_ we glimpse this romance quality. It is time for novelists to stop sharpening goosequills and join the scientists. Science is rose of a million petals, in whose unfolding the future lies. In that future the novelist, professional story teller, playwright, will be as useful as a bootjack to an old maid. Upon the outspread shop-counter of the mind will be found goods never seen, nor dreamed. Art is dying. Something else must be made to light the heart. Only people with the wonder, the love of little children within them, can create it now, or understand it. They will perforce join the discards.