Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/49

 ether, and similar products, will have to be very jealously safeguarded within the next few years.

Differing from many writers, I do not regard this development of the nervous system as a mark of degeneration. On the contrary, it is a part of the great and rapid adaptation which is bound to take place in the constitution of man himself to the rapidly-changing conditions of his environment, his life, and the duties he will have to fulfil, To overlook the certainty of such adaptations is to be blind to all history, and especially to all recent history. The men and women of the new age will differ from ourselves in much the same sort of way as we differ from our great-grandfathers. They will differ more only because the progress of the century which we have lately begun will be so much more rapid and various than those of the century before—itself the period of enormously the greatest changes since the world began to be civilised.