Metanthropos, or, The body of the future / by Ronald Campbell MacFie.
- Ronald Campbell Macfie
- Date:
- 1928
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.
12/128 page 8
No text description is available for this image
No text description is available for this image
No text description is available for this image![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]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/B18019596_0013.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)