Metanthropos, or, The body of the future / by Ronald Campbell MacFie.

  • Ronald Campbell Macfie
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Metanthropos, or, The body of the future / by Ronald Campbell MacFie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    METANTHROPOS thousand million years a few progressive bacteria were transmogrified into Newtons, and Kelvins, and Shakespeares, and Hux- leys and Darwins, which made pleasant feeding for the other bacteria of more con¬ servative tendencies. Five hundred mil¬ lion years ago a Londoner of to-day might have been a lamprey in the Tethys Sea ; three million years ago a salamander in an Gondwana marsh ; sixty million years ago a lemur in a forest of Lemuria. Such then is the far past of man—a creepy-crawly, slimy, slithery, finny, furry past. Can we perhaps from such a past foretell his far future ? Can we map out a curve from the nebula through the amoeba, and worm, and pithecanthropus, and man, to the Metanthropos of the future ? We cannot. We have no right and no reason to infer—as is so often done—that the rate of progress in the future will be equal, or nearly equal, to the rate of pro¬ gress in the far past, or that we can judge of the direction and nature of future evolution from the direction and nature of evolutionary changes in the past. To [10]
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