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The World Set Free Prelude · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Section one preface of the World Set Free by H. G. Wells.
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Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Adam Marcitage, June two
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Speaker 1: thousand and nine, Alexandria, Virginia. The World Set Free by H. G. Wells,
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Speaker 1: Section one preface. The World Set Free was written in
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Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen and published early in nineteen fourteen, and it
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Speaker 1: is the latest of a series of three fantasias of
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Speaker 1: possibility stories, which all turn on the possible developments in
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Speaker 1: the future of some contemporary force or group of forces.
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Speaker 1: The World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow
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Speaker 1: of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world
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Speaker 1: felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of
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Speaker 1: a hurting it, but few of us realized in the
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Speaker 1: earlier half of nineteen fourteen how near the crash was
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Speaker 1: to us. The reader will be amused to find that
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Speaker 1: here it is put off until the year nineteen fifty six.
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Speaker 1: He may naturally want to know the reason for what
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Speaker 1: will seem a now quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet,
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Speaker 1: the author must confess he has always been inclined to
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Speaker 1: be a rather slow profit. The war aeroplane in the
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Speaker 1: world of reality, for example, beat the forecast and anticipations
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Speaker 1: by about twenty years or so. I suppose a desire
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Speaker 1: not to shock the skeptical reader's sense of use and want,
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Speaker 1: and perhaps a less credible disposition to hedge have something
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Speaker 1: to do with this dating forward of one's main events.
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Speaker 1: But in the particular case of the World set Free,
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Speaker 1: there was I think another motive in holding the Great
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Speaker 1: War back, and that was to allow the chemists to
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Speaker 1: get well forward with his discovery of the release of
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Speaker 1: atomic energy. Nineteen fifty six, or for that matter, two
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Speaker 1: thousand fifty six may be none too late for that
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Speaker 1: crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination
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Speaker 1: of over forty years, the guests at the opening phase
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Speaker 1: of the war was fairly lucky. The forecast of an
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Speaker 1: alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaign through the Netherlands,
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Speaker 1: and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force were all
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Speaker 1: justified before the book had been published six months, and
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Speaker 1: the opening section of chapter the second remains now after
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Speaker 1: the reality has happened a fairly adequate diagnosis of the
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Speaker 1: essentials of the matter. One happy hit in chapter the
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Speaker 1: second section two, on which the writer may congratulate himself,
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Speaker 1: is the forecast that, under modern conditions be quite impossible
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Speaker 1: for any great general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate
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Speaker 1: the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There could
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Speaker 1: be noe Alexander's or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
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Speaker 1: scientific corps muttering these old fools exactly as it is hereforetold. These, however,
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Speaker 1: are small details, and the misses in the story far
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Speaker 1: outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is
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Speaker 1: still of interest now, the thesis that, because of the
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Speaker 1: development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign
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Speaker 1: empires are no longer possible in the world, and that
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Speaker 1: to attempt to keep on with the old system is
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Speaker 1: to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind, and perhaps to
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Speaker 1: destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book
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Speaker 1: now is the sustained validity of this thesis and the
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Speaker 1: discussion of the possible ending of war on the earth.
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Speaker 1: I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to
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Speaker 1: break out among the rulers of states and the leaders
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Speaker 1: of mankind. I have represented the native common sense of
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Speaker 1: a French mind and of the English mind. For manifestly,
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Speaker 1: King Egbert is meant to be God's Englishmen, leading mankind
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Speaker 1: towards a bold and resolute effort of salvage and reconstruction.
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Speaker 1: Instead of which, as the schoolbook footnotes say, compare today's newspaper.
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Speaker 1: Instead of a frank and honorable gathering of leading men
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Speaker 1: Englishmen meeting German and frenchmen, Russian brothers in their offenses
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Speaker 1: and in their disaster upon the hills of Brisago, be
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Speaker 1: held in Geneva, at the other end of Switzerland, a
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Speaker 1: poor little league of allied nations excluding the United States, Russia,
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Speaker 1: and most of the subject peoples of the world, meeting
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Speaker 1: obscurely amidst a world wide disregard to make important gestures
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Speaker 1: at the leading problems of the tobaccle. Either the disaster
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Speaker 1: has not been vast enough yet, or it has not
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Speaker 1: been swift enough to inflict the necessary moral shock and
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Speaker 1: achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as the world of
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Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen was used to an increasing prosperity and thought
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Speaker 1: that increase would go on forever. So now it would
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Speaker 1: seem the world as growing accustomed to a steady glide
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Speaker 1: towards social disintegration, and thinks that two can go on
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Speaker 1: continually and never come to a final bump. So soon
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Speaker 1: do use and want establish themselves, And the most flaming
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Speaker 1: and thunderous of lessons pale into disregard. The question whether
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Speaker 1: a LeBlanc is still possible, The question whether it is
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Speaker 1: still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity
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Speaker 1: in mankind to avert this steady glide to destruction is
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Speaker 1: not one of the most urgent in the world. It
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Speaker 1: is clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope
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Speaker 1: that there is such a possibility, But he has to
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Speaker 1: confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth
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Speaker 1: of understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort
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Speaker 1: to turn the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia
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Speaker 1: of dead ideas and old institutions carries on us towards
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Speaker 1: the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plain
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Speaker 1: recognition of the idea of human commonwealth as something overriding
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Speaker 1: any national patriotic consideration, And that is in the working
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Speaker 1: class movement throughout the world, and labor international is is
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Speaker 1: closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution.
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Speaker 1: If world peace is to be attained through labor internationalism,
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Speaker 1: it will have to be attained at the price of
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Speaker 1: the completest social and economic reconstruction, and by passing through
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Speaker 1: a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that
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Speaker 1: may be very bloody, which may be prolonged through a
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Speaker 1: long period, and may in the end fail to achieve
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Speaker 1: anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it
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Speaker 1: is in the labor class, and the labor class alone,
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Speaker 1: that any conception of a world rule and a world
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Speaker 1: peace has so far appeared. The dream of the world
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Speaker 1: set free, a dream of highly educated and highly favored
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Speaker 1: leading and ruling men voluntarily setting themselves to the task
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Speaker 1: of reshaping the world, has thus far remained to dream. H. G. Wells,
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Speaker 1: Easton Glebe Dunmow, nineteen twenty one, Prelude the Sun Snarers,
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Speaker 1: Section one. The history of mankind is the history of
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Speaker 1: attainment of external power. Man is the tool using fire
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Speaker 1: making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career, we
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Speaker 1: find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of
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Speaker 1: a beast. By the heat of burning and the rough
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Speaker 1: implement of stone, so he passed beyond the ape. From
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Speaker 1: that he expands. Presently he added to himself the power
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Speaker 1: of the horse and the ox. He borrowed the carrying
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Speaker 1: strength of water, and the driving force of the wind.
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Speaker 1: He quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools
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Speaker 1: pointed first with copper and then with iron, increased and
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Speaker 1: varied and became more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his
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Speaker 1: heat in houses and made his way easier by paths
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Speaker 1: and roads. He complicated his social relationships and increased his
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Speaker 1: efficiency by the division of labor. He began to store
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Speaker 1: up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it possible for
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Speaker 1: a man to do more, always down the lengthening record,
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Speaker 1: save for a setback, Ever and again he is doing more.
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Speaker 1: A quarter of a million years ago, the utmost man
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Speaker 1: was a savage, being scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in
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Speaker 1: the rocks, armed with a rough hewn flint or a
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Speaker 1: fire pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed
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Speaker 1: by some younger man. So soon as his first virile
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Speaker 1: activity declined over most of the great wilderness of Earth
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Speaker 1: you would have sought him in vain. Only in a
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Speaker 1: few temperate and subject tropical river valleys would you have
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Speaker 1: found the squatting lairs of his little herds. A male,
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Speaker 1: a few females, a child, or so. He knew no future, then,
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Speaker 1: no kind of life except the life he led. He
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Speaker 1: fled the cave, bear over the rocks full of iron
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Speaker 1: ore and the promise of sword and spear. He froze
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Speaker 1: to death upon a ledge of coal. He drank water
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Speaker 1: muddy with the clay that would one day make cups
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Speaker 1: of porcelain. He chewed the ear of wild weed he
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Speaker 1: had plucked, and gazed with a dim speculation in the
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Speaker 1: eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or
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Speaker 1: suddenly he became aware of the scent of another male,
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Speaker 1: and rose up, roaring his roars the formless precursors of
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Speaker 1: moral admonitions. For he was a great individualist, that original,
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Speaker 1: He suffered none other than himself. So through the long generations,
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Speaker 1: this heavy pre cursor, this ancestor of all of us,
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Speaker 1: fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly. Yet he changed,
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Speaker 1: that keen chisel of necessity wohilch sharpened the tiger's claw.
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Speaker 1: Age by age, and find down the clumsy orchippus. To
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Speaker 1: the swift grace of the horse was at work upon him,
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Speaker 1: is at work upon him. Still the clumsier and more
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Speaker 1: stupidly fierce among him were killed. Soonest and oftetest. The
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Speaker 1: finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better
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Speaker 1: balanced body prevailed age by age. The implements were a
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Speaker 1: little better, made the man a little more delicately adjusted
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Speaker 1: to his possibilities. He became more social, his herd grew larger.
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Speaker 1: No longer did each man kill or drive out his
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Speaker 1: growing sons. A system of taboos made them tolerable to him,
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Speaker 1: and they revered him alive and soon even after he
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Speaker 1: was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and
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Speaker 1: the rest of mankind. But they were forbidden to touch
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Speaker 1: the women of the tribe. They had to go out
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Speaker 1: and capture women for themselves. And each son fled from
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Speaker 1: his stepmother and hid from her, lest the anger of
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Speaker 1: the old man should be roused all the world over.
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Speaker 1: Even to this day, these ancient, inevitable taboos can be traced.
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Speaker 1: And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and
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Speaker 1: the fire was better tended, and there were wrappings and garments,
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Speaker 1: and so aided. The creature spread into colder climates, carrying
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Speaker 1: food with him, storring food, until sometimes the neglected grass
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Speaker 1: seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of agriculture.
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Speaker 1: And already there were the beginnings of leisure, and thought.
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Speaker 1: Man began to think. There were times when he was fed,
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Speaker 1: when his lusts and his fears were all appeased. When
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Speaker 1: the sun shone upon the squatting place, and dim stirrings
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Speaker 1: of speculation lit his eyes, he scratched upon a bone
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Speaker 1: and found resemblance, and pursued it and began pictorial art.
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Speaker 1: Molded the soft, warm clay of the river bank between
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Speaker 1: his fingers and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions.
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Speaker 1: Shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that
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Speaker 1: it would hold water. He watched the streaming river and
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Speaker 1: wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water came. He
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Speaker 1: blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might
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Speaker 1: snare it and spear it as it went down to
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Speaker 1: its resting place amidst the distant hills. Then he was
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Speaker 1: roused to convey to his brother that once, indeed he
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Speaker 1: had done so, at least that some one had done so.
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Speaker 1: He mixed that, perhaps with another dream, almost as daring,
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Speaker 1: that one day a mammoth had been set, and therewith
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Speaker 1: began fiction, pointing away to achievement, and the august prophetic
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Speaker 1: procession of tales for scores and hundreds of centuries, for
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Speaker 1: myriads of generations, that life of our fathers went on,
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Speaker 1: from the beginning to the ripening of that phase of
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Speaker 1: human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped
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Speaker 1: flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two
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Speaker 1: or three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So
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Speaker 1: slowly by human standards did humanity gather itself together out
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Speaker 1: of the dim intimations of the beast. And that first
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Speaker 1: glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story teller,
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Speaker 1: bright eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to
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Speaker 1: his gaping, incredulous listener, gripping his wrists to keep him
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Speaker 1: at intentive, was the most marvelous beginning this world has
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Speaker 1: ever seen. It doomed the mammoths, and it began the
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Speaker 1: setting of that snare that shall catch the sun. Section two.
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Speaker 1: That dream was but a moment in a man's life,
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Speaker 1: whose proper business, it seemed, was to get food, and
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Speaker 1: kill his fellows, and beget after the manner of all
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Speaker 1: that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts about him,
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Speaker 1: hidden from him by the thinnest of vales, where the
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Speaker 1: untouched sources of power, whose magnitude we scarcely do more
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Speaker 1: than suspect even today, power that could make his every
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Speaker 1: conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race
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Speaker 1: were in the way of it. Though he died blindly,
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Speaker 1: unknowing at last in the generous levels of warm river valleys,
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Speaker 1: where food is abundant and life very easy. The emerging human,
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Speaker 1: overcoming his earlier jealousies, becoming as necessity persecuted him less urgently,
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Speaker 1: more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community.
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Speaker 1: There began a division of labor. Certain of the older
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Speaker 1: men specialized in knowledge and direction. A strong man took
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Speaker 1: the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king began
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Speaker 1: to develop their roles. In the opening drama of man's history,
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Speaker 1: the priest's solicitude was seed time and harvest and fertility,
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Speaker 1: and the king ruled peace and war in a hundred
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Speaker 1: river valleys about the warm temperate zone of the earth.
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Speaker 1: There were already towns and temples a score of thousand
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Speaker 1: years ago. They flourished, unrecorded, ignoring the past, and unsuspicious
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Speaker 1: of the future, for as yet writing had still to begin.
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Speaker 1: Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable
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Speaker 1: wealth of power that offered itself on every hand to him.
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Speaker 1: He tamed certain animals, He developed his primordially haphazard agriculture
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Speaker 1: into a ritual. He added first one metal to his resources,
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Speaker 1: and then another, until he had copper and tin, and
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Speaker 1: iron and lead, and gold and silver to supplement his stone.
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Speaker 1: He hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his
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Speaker 1: river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel,
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Speaker 1: and made the first roads. But his chief activity for
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Speaker 1: a hundred centuries and more was a subjugation of himself
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Speaker 1: and others to larger and larger societies. The history of
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Speaker 1: man is not simply the conquest of external power. It
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Speaker 1: is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses that
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Speaker 1: self concentrate and intensity of animalism that tie his hands
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Speaker 1: from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents
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Speaker 1: association from the dawn of the age of polished Stone
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Speaker 1: to the achievement of the peace of the world. Man's
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Speaker 1: dealings were chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining,
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Speaker 1: law making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every little increment
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Speaker 1: in power he turned at once and always turns to
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Speaker 1: the purposes of this confused, elaborate struggle. To socialize, to
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Speaker 1: incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a community of
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Speaker 1: purpose became the last and greatest of his instincts. Already
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Speaker 1: before the last polished phase of the Stone age was over,
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Speaker 1: he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly far
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Speaker 1: reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting, and then of
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Speaker 1: writing and making records, and with that his town communities
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Speaker 1: began to stretch out to dominion. In the valleys of
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Speaker 1: the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers, the
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Speaker 1: first empires and the first written laws had their beginnings.
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Speaker 1: Men specialized for fighting and rule as soldiers and knights. Later,
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Speaker 1: as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean, which had been a barrier,
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Speaker 1: became a highway, and at last, out of a tangle
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Speaker 1: of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome.
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Speaker 1: The history of Europe is the history of the victory
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Speaker 1: and breaking up of the Roman Empire. Every ascended monarch
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Speaker 1: in Europe up to the last aped caesar and called
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Speaker 1: himself Kaiser or tsar, or imperator or casir e hind
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Speaker 1: Measured by the duration of human life, it it is
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Speaker 1: a vast space of time between that first dynasty in
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Speaker 1: Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane. But by the
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Speaker 1: scale that looks back to the makers of the eoliths,
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Speaker 1: it is all of it a story of yesterday now.
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Speaker 1: During this period of two hundred centuries or more, this
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Speaker 1: period of the warring States, while men's minds were chiefly
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Speaker 1: preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the
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Speaker 1: acquirement of external power was slow, rapid in comparison with
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Speaker 1: the progress of the Old Stone Age, but slow in
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Speaker 1: comparison with this new age of systematic discovery in which
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Speaker 1: we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons
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Speaker 1: and tactics of warfare, The methods of agriculture, seamanship, their
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Speaker 1: knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils
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Speaker 1: of domestic life. Between the days of the early Egyptians
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Speaker 1: and the days when Christopher Columbus was a child, of course,
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Speaker 1: there were inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions.
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Speaker 1: Things were found out and then forgotten again. It was,
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Speaker 1: on the whole a progress, but it contained no steps.
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Speaker 1: The peasant life was the same. There were already priests
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Speaker 1: and lawyers and townscraftsmen and territorial lords and rulers, doctors,
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Speaker 1: wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and
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Speaker 1: Assyria and southeastern Europe at the beginning of that period,
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Speaker 1: and they were doing much the same things and living
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Speaker 1: much the same life as they were in Europe in
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Speaker 1: eighty fifteen hundred. The English excavators of the year eighty
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Speaker 1: nineteen hundred could delve into the remains of Babylon and
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Speaker 1: Egypt and disinter legal documents, accounts, and family correspondents that
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Speaker 1: they could read with the completest sympathy. There were great
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Speaker 1: religious and moral changes throughout the period. Empires and republics
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Speaker 1: replaced one another. Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery,
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Speaker 1: and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed
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Speaker 1: and failed, and was still to be tested again and
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Speaker 1: rejected again. In the New World. Christianity and Mohammedanism swept
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Speaker 1: away a thousand more specialized cults. But essentially these were
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Speaker 1: progressive adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have
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Speaker 1: seemed fixed forever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the
22:48
Speaker 1: material conditions of life would have been entirely strange to
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Speaker 1: human thought through all that time. Yet the dreamer, the
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Speaker 1: story teller was there still waiting for his opportunity. Amidst
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Speaker 1: the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions,
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Speaker 1: the castle building and cathedral building, the arts and loves,
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Speaker 1: the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades and trading
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Speaker 1: journeys of the Middle Ages. He no longer speculated with
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Speaker 1: the untrammeled freedom of the Stone Age savage authoritative explanations
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Speaker 1: of everything barred his path. But he speculated with a
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Speaker 1: better brain. Sat idle and gazed at circling stars in
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Speaker 1: the sky, and mused upon the coin and crystal in
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Speaker 1: his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for thought.
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Speaker 1: Throughout these times, then men were to be found dissatisfied
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Speaker 1: with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances of
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Speaker 1: orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in
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Speaker 1: the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.
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Speaker 1: Through all the ages of history there were men to
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Speaker 1: whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.
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Speaker 1: They could no longer lead ordinary lives, nor content themselves
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Speaker 1: with the common things of this world. Once they had
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Speaker 1: heard this voice, and mostly they believed not only that
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Speaker 1: all this world, as it were, a painted curtain before
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Speaker 1: things unguessed at, but that these secrets were power. Hitherto
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Speaker 1: power had come to men by chance. But now there
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Speaker 1: were these seekers, seeking, seeking among rare and curious and
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Speaker 1: perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilizable thing, sometimes deceiving
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Speaker 1: themselves with fancy discovery, sometimes pretending to find the world
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Speaker 1: of every day. Laughed at these eccentric beings, or found
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Speaker 1: them annoying and ill treated them, or was seized with
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Speaker 1: fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them,
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Speaker 1: or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully but for the
25:15
Speaker 1: greater part heeded them not at all. Yet they were
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Speaker 1: of the blood of him who had first dreamt of
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Speaker 1: attacking the mammoth. Every one of them was of his
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Speaker 1: blood and descent. And the thing they sought, all unwittingly
25:32
Speaker 1: was the snare that will someday catch the sun. Section three.
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Speaker 1: Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went
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Speaker 1: about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state
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Speaker 1: of dignified abstraction. His commonplace books are full of prophetic
25:51
Speaker 1: subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators.
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Speaker 1: Durer was his parallel, and Roger Bacon, whom the Franciscans
26:02
Speaker 1: silence of his kindred. Such a man again, in an
26:06
Speaker 1: earlier city, was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the
26:10
Speaker 1: power of steam nineteen hundred years before it was first
26:14
Speaker 1: brought into use, And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse,
26:19
Speaker 1: and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Snossos. All up
26:24
Speaker 1: and down the record of history, wherever there was a
26:27
Speaker 1: little leisure from war and brutality, the seekers appeared, and
26:32
Speaker 1: half the alchemists were of their tribe. When Roger Bacon
26:37
Speaker 1: blew up his first batch of gunpowder. One might have
26:40
Speaker 1: supposed that men would have gone at once to the
26:43
Speaker 1: explosive engine, But they could see nothing of the sort.
26:48
Speaker 1: They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things.
26:51
Speaker 1: Their metallurgy was all too poor to make such engines,
26:55
Speaker 1: even had they thought of them for a time. They
26:59
Speaker 1: could not make instruments sound enough to stand this new force,
27:04
Speaker 1: even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile.
27:07
Speaker 1: Their first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the
27:11
Speaker 1: world waited for more than five hundred years before the
27:15
Speaker 1: explosive engine came. Even when the seekers found it was
27:20
Speaker 1: at first a long journey before the world could use
27:23
Speaker 1: their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes.
27:29
Speaker 1: If man in general was not still as absolutely blind
27:34
Speaker 1: to the unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor,
27:40
Speaker 1: he was at least purblind. Section four. The laden energy
27:47
Speaker 1: of coal and the power of steam waited long on
27:50
Speaker 1: the verge of discovery before they began to influence human lives.
27:55
Speaker 1: There were, no doubt, many such devices as heroes toys,
27:59
Speaker 1: devised in forgotten time after time in courts and palaces,
28:04
Speaker 1: but it needed that coal should be mined and burning,
28:07
Speaker 1: with plenty of iron at hand. Before it dawned upon
28:11
Speaker 1: men that here was something more than a curiosity. And
28:15
Speaker 1: it is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion
28:19
Speaker 1: for the use of steam was in war. There is
28:22
Speaker 1: an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire
28:26
Speaker 1: shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water,
28:31
Speaker 1: the mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron
28:34
Speaker 1: upon a larger scale than men had ever done before.
28:38
Speaker 1: The steam pumping engine, the steam engine, and the steamboat
28:43
Speaker 1: followed one another in an order that had a kind
28:46
Speaker 1: of logical necessity. It is a most interesting and instructive
28:51
Speaker 1: chapter in the history of the human intelligence. The history
28:55
Speaker 1: of steam, from its beginning is a fact in human consciousness.
28:59
Speaker 1: To the perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded
29:03
Speaker 1: the utilization of intramolecular power, nearly every human being must
29:09
Speaker 1: have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of years.
29:15
Speaker 1: The women, in particular, were always heating water, boiling it,
29:19
Speaker 1: seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance
29:23
Speaker 1: with its fury. Millions of people at different times must
29:27
Speaker 1: have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls,
29:31
Speaker 1: and blowing pummice into foam. And yet you may search
29:35
Speaker 1: the whole human record through letters, books, inscriptions, pictures for
29:42
Speaker 1: any glimmer of a realization that here was force, here
29:46
Speaker 1: was strength to borrow and use. Then suddenly man woke
29:50
Speaker 1: up to it. The railways spread like a network over
29:54
Speaker 1: the globe. The ever enlarging iron steamships began their staggering
29:59
Speaker 1: fight against wind and wave. Steam was the first comer
30:03
Speaker 1: in the new powers. It was the beginning of the
30:06
Speaker 1: age of energy that was to close the long history
30:10
Speaker 1: of the warring states. But for a long time men
30:14
Speaker 1: did not realize the importance of this novelty. They would
30:18
Speaker 1: not recognize. They were not able to recognize that anything
30:22
Speaker 1: fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called the
30:28
Speaker 1: steam engine the iron horse, and pretended that they had
30:31
Speaker 1: made the most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory
30:36
Speaker 1: production were visibly revolutionizing the conditions of industrial production. Population
30:44
Speaker 1: was streaming steadily in from the countryside and concentrating in
30:49
Speaker 1: hitherto unthought of masses. About a few city centers. Food
30:55
Speaker 1: was coming to them over enormous distances, upon a scale
30:59
Speaker 1: that made the one sole precedent the Cornships of Imperial
31:03
Speaker 1: Rome a petty incident, and a huge migration of peoples
31:08
Speaker 1: between Europe and Western Asia and America was in progress,
31:13
Speaker 1: and nobody seems to have realized that something new had
31:17
Speaker 1: come into human life, a strange swirl, different altogether from
31:22
Speaker 1: any previous circling and mutation, A swirl like the swirl
31:27
Speaker 1: when at last the lock gates begin to open after
31:30
Speaker 1: a long phase of accumulating water and eddying inactivity. The
31:36
Speaker 1: sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could
31:40
Speaker 1: sit at his breakfast table, decide between tea from Ceylon
31:45
Speaker 1: or coffee from Brazil, Devour an egg from France with
31:49
Speaker 1: some Danish ham, or eat a New zealand chop. Wind
31:53
Speaker 1: up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at
31:57
Speaker 1: the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinize the prices
32:01
Speaker 1: current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan,
32:07
Speaker 1: and Egypt. Until the two children he had begotten in
32:11
Speaker 1: the place of his father's aid that he thought the
32:15
Speaker 1: world changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their
32:19
Speaker 1: hair cut, go to the old school. He had gone
32:22
Speaker 1: to shirk the lessons he had shirked. Learn a few
32:26
Speaker 1: scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion
32:29
Speaker 1: of cads, and all would be well with them. Section five. Electricity,
32:39
Speaker 1: though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to
32:42
Speaker 1: be studied, invaded the common life of men a few
32:46
Speaker 1: decades after the exploitation of steam to electricity. Also, in
32:52
Speaker 1: spite of its provocative nearness all about him, mankind had
32:57
Speaker 1: been utterly blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more
33:02
Speaker 1: emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered
33:07
Speaker 1: at man's ears, It signaled to him in blinding flashes.
33:12
Speaker 1: Occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it
33:15
Speaker 1: as a thing that concerned him enough to merits study.
33:18
Speaker 1: It came into the house with the cat on any
33:21
Speaker 1: dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.
33:27
Speaker 1: It rotted his metals when he put them together. There
33:30
Speaker 1: is no single record that anyone questioned why the cat's
33:34
Speaker 1: fur crackles, or why hair is so unruly to brush
33:38
Speaker 1: on a frosty day. Before the sixteenth century. For endless years,
33:43
Speaker 1: man seems to have done this very successful best not
33:47
Speaker 1: to think about it at all, until this new spirit
33:51
Speaker 1: of the seeker turned itself to these things. How often
33:56
Speaker 1: things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant before
34:00
Speaker 1: the speculative eye and the movement of vision came. It
34:04
Speaker 1: was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his
34:09
Speaker 1: brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk
34:12
Speaker 1: and shillac, and so began the quickening of the human
34:16
Speaker 1: mind to the existence of this universal presence. And even
34:21
Speaker 1: then the science of electricity remained a mere little group
34:25
Speaker 1: of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps
34:30
Speaker 1: with magnetism, a mere guess that, perhaps with the lightning
34:37
Speaker 1: frog's legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron
34:41
Speaker 1: railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.
34:46
Speaker 1: Except for the lighting conductor. It was two hundred and
34:50
Speaker 1: fifty years after Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the
34:54
Speaker 1: cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man. Then, suddenly,
35:01
Speaker 1: in the half century between eighteen eighty and nineteen thirty,
35:05
Speaker 1: it ousted the steam engine and took over traction. It
35:10
Speaker 1: ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with
35:16
Speaker 1: the perfected wireless telephone and the telephotograph Section six. And
35:25
Speaker 1: there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and invention
35:30
Speaker 1: for at least one hundred years after the scientific revolution
35:33
Speaker 1: had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice
35:37
Speaker 1: against a skepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One
35:42
Speaker 1: writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation
35:47
Speaker 1: that happened. He says in the year eighteen ninety eight,
35:51
Speaker 1: within ten years, that is to say, of the time
35:54
Speaker 1: when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He
35:58
Speaker 1: tells us how he said at his desk in his
36:01
Speaker 1: study and conversed with his little boy. His little boy
36:05
Speaker 1: was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak
36:08
Speaker 1: very seriously to his father, and as he was a
36:12
Speaker 1: kindly little boy, he did not want to do it
36:14
Speaker 1: too harshly. This is what happened. I wish, daddy, he said,
36:21
Speaker 1: coming to his point, that you wouldn't write all this
36:25
Speaker 1: stuff about flying. The chaps rot me, yes, said his father,
36:32
Speaker 1: an old broomy the head, I mean, he rots me
36:36
Speaker 1: everybody rots me, but there's going to be flying quite soon.
36:43
Speaker 1: The little boy was too well bred to say what
36:46
Speaker 1: he thought of that. Anyhow, he said, I wish you
36:51
Speaker 1: wouldn't write about it. You'll fly lots of times before
36:56
Speaker 1: you die, the father assured him. The little boy looked unhappy.
37:03
Speaker 1: The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took
37:06
Speaker 1: out a blurred and underdeveloped photograph. Come and look at this,
37:12
Speaker 1: he said. The little boy came round to him. The
37:16
Speaker 1: photograph showed a stream and a meadow beyond in some trees,
37:21
Speaker 1: and in the air a black pencil like object with
37:24
Speaker 1: flat wings on either side of it. It was the
37:27
Speaker 1: first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that
37:31
Speaker 1: ever maintained itself in the air by a mechanical force.
37:35
Speaker 1: Across the margin was written, here we go up, Up,
37:39
Speaker 1: Up from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. The father
37:47
Speaker 1: watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son. Well.
37:52
Speaker 1: He said, that, said the schoolboy, after reflection, is only
37:58
Speaker 1: a model model to day man tomorrow. The boy seemed
38:05
Speaker 1: divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he
38:09
Speaker 1: believed quite firmly to be omniscients but old Broomie, he said,
38:16
Speaker 1: He told all the boys in his class only yesterday.
38:20
Speaker 1: No man will ever fly. No one, he says, who
38:24
Speaker 1: has ever shot, groused or pheasants on the wing, would
38:27
Speaker 1: ever believe anything of the sword. Yet that boy lived
38:31
Speaker 1: to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father's Reminiscences
38:38
Speaker 1: Section seven. At the close of the nineteenth century, as
38:42
Speaker 1: a multitude of passages in the literature of that time witnesses,
38:47
Speaker 1: it was thought that the fact that man had at
38:50
Speaker 1: last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam that
38:55
Speaker 1: scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about
38:59
Speaker 1: the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a
39:03
Speaker 1: culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual courage. The
39:09
Speaker 1: air of nunkdimitis sounds in same of these writings. The
39:15
Speaker 1: great things are discovered, wrote Gerald Brown in his summary
39:19
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. For us, there remains little but
39:23
Speaker 1: the working out of detail. The spirit of the seeker
39:27
Speaker 1: was still rare in the world. Education was unskilled, unstimulating,
39:32
Speaker 1: scholarly but little valued, And few people even then could
39:36
Speaker 1: have realized that science was still but the flimsiest of
39:40
Speaker 1: trial sketches and discoveries scarcely beginning. No one seems to
39:45
Speaker 1: have been afraid of science and his possibilities. Yet now
39:49
Speaker 1: when there had been but a score or so of seekers,
39:53
Speaker 1: there were many thousands. And for one needle of speculation
39:57
Speaker 1: that had been probing the curtain of appearances in in
40:00
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, there were now hundreds. And already chemistry, which
40:05
Speaker 1: had been content with her atoms and molecules for the
40:08
Speaker 1: better part of a century, was preparing herself for that
40:12
Speaker 1: vast next stride that was to revolutionize the whole life
40:16
Speaker 1: of man from top to bottom. One realizes how crude
40:21
Speaker 1: was the science of that time when one considers the
40:24
Speaker 1: case of the composition of air. This was determined by
40:29
Speaker 1: that strange genius and recluse, that man of mystery that
40:33
Speaker 1: disemboweled intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the eighteenth century.
40:40
Speaker 1: So far as he was concerned, the work was admirably done.
40:45
Speaker 1: He separated all the known ingredients of the air with
40:48
Speaker 1: precision altogether remarkable. He even put it upon record that
40:54
Speaker 1: he had some doubt about the purity of the nitrogen.
40:58
Speaker 1: For more than one hundred years, his determination was repeated
41:01
Speaker 1: by chemists all the world over. His apparatus was treasured
41:07
Speaker 1: in London, he became, as they used to say, classic,
41:11
Speaker 1: and always at every one of the innumerable repetitions of
41:15
Speaker 1: his experiment, that sly element argonne was hiding among the nitrogen,
41:21
Speaker 1: and with the little helium, and traces of other substances,
41:25
Speaker 1: and indeed all the hints that might have led to
41:28
Speaker 1: the new departures of the twentieth century chemistry. And every
41:32
Speaker 1: time it slipped unobserved through the professional fingers that repeated
41:37
Speaker 1: his procedure. Is it any wonder, then, with this margin
41:42
Speaker 1: of inaccuracy, that up to the very dawn of the
41:45
Speaker 1: twentieth century, scientific discovery was still rather a procession of
41:51
Speaker 1: happy accident than an orderly conquest of nature. Yet the
41:56
Speaker 1: spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world. Even
42:00
Speaker 1: the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful
42:04
Speaker 1: who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the
42:07
Speaker 1: secrets of nature in the nineteenth century. There were now,
42:11
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the twentieth myriads escaping from the
42:15
Speaker 1: limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life in Europe,
42:21
Speaker 1: in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and
42:26
Speaker 1: all about the world. It was in nineteen ten that
42:30
Speaker 1: the parents of young Holston, who was to be called
42:33
Speaker 1: by a whole generation of scientific men the greatest of
42:37
Speaker 1: European chemists, were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,
42:44
Speaker 1: between Fiezo, LEAs and Florence. He was only then fifteen,
42:50
Speaker 1: but he was already distinguished as a mathematician, and possessed
42:54
Speaker 1: by a savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly
42:59
Speaker 1: at tested by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent
43:04
Speaker 1: unrelatedness to every other source of light. He was to
43:08
Speaker 1: tell afterwards in his reminiscences, how he watched the fireflies
43:13
Speaker 1: drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden
43:16
Speaker 1: of the villa, under the warm blue night sky of Italy,
43:21
Speaker 1: how he caught and kept them in cages, dissected them,
43:25
Speaker 1: first studying the general anatomy of insects very elaborately, and
43:30
Speaker 1: how he begun to experiment with the effect of various
43:33
Speaker 1: gases and varying temperatures upon their light. Then the chance
43:39
Speaker 1: present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William Crooks,
43:45
Speaker 1: a toy called the spin thyroscope, on which radium particles
43:49
Speaker 1: impinge upon sulfide of zinc and make it luminous, induced
43:54
Speaker 1: him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was
43:58
Speaker 1: a happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare
44:03
Speaker 1: and fortunate thing, too, that any one with the mathematical
44:08
Speaker 1: gift should have been taken by these curiosities. Section eight.
44:16
Speaker 1: And while the boy Holston was mooning over his fireflies
44:20
Speaker 1: at Fiazole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was
44:26
Speaker 1: giving a course of afternoon lectures upon radium and radioactivity
44:32
Speaker 1: in Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very
44:36
Speaker 1: considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small
44:40
Speaker 1: lecture theater that had become more and more congested as
44:45
Speaker 1: his course proceeded. At his concluding discussion, it was crowded
44:50
Speaker 1: right up to the ceiling at the back, and there
44:53
Speaker 1: people were standing standing without any sense of fatigue. So
44:57
Speaker 1: fascinating did they find his suggestion uestions. One young stern particular,
45:03
Speaker 1: a chuckle headed, scrub haired lad from the Highlands, sat
45:07
Speaker 1: hugging his knee with great sand red hands and drinking
45:12
Speaker 1: in every word, eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning,
45:18
Speaker 1: and so said the professor. We see that this radium,
45:23
Speaker 1: which seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion
45:28
Speaker 1: of all that was most established and fundamental in the
45:31
Speaker 1: constitution of matter, is really at one with the rest
45:35
Speaker 1: of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what probably
45:40
Speaker 1: all the other elements are doing, with an imperceptible slowness.
45:45
Speaker 1: It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays
45:48
Speaker 1: the silent, breathing multitude in the darkness. Radium is an
45:53
Speaker 1: element that is breaking up and flying to pieces, but
45:57
Speaker 1: perhaps all elements are doing that at less perceptible rates.
46:02
Speaker 1: Uranium certainly is thorium, the stuff of this incandescent gas.
46:08
Speaker 1: Mental certainly is actinium. I feel that we are but
46:14
Speaker 1: beginning the list, and we know now that the atom
46:18
Speaker 1: that once we thought hard and impenetrable and indivisible and
46:23
Speaker 1: final and lifeless, lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy.
46:30
Speaker 1: That is the most wonderful thing about all this work.
46:34
Speaker 1: A little while ago we thought of the atoms as
46:38
Speaker 1: we thought of bricks as solid building material, as substantial matter,
46:43
Speaker 1: as unit masses of lifeless stuff. And behold, these bricks
46:48
Speaker 1: are boxes treasure, boxes boxes full of the intensest force.
46:55
Speaker 1: This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide,
47:00
Speaker 1: that is to say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium.
47:05
Speaker 1: It is worth about a pound. And in this bottle,
47:10
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this bottle there's
47:14
Speaker 1: slumbers at least as much energy as we could get
47:18
Speaker 1: by burning one hundred and sixty tons of coal. If
47:22
Speaker 1: at a word, in one instant, I could suddenly release
47:26
Speaker 1: that energy here and now, it would blow us and
47:30
Speaker 1: everything about us to fragments. If I could turn it
47:34
Speaker 1: into the machinery that lights this city, it could keep
47:38
Speaker 1: Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no
47:42
Speaker 1: man knows, no man has an inkling of how this
47:45
Speaker 1: little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the
47:49
Speaker 1: release of its store. It does release it as a
47:52
Speaker 1: burn trickles slowly. The uranium changes into radium, The radium
47:58
Speaker 1: changes into a gas, the radium emanation, and that again
48:03
Speaker 1: to what we call radium A. And so the process
48:07
Speaker 1: goes on giving out energy at every stage until at
48:11
Speaker 1: last we reached the last stage of all, which is
48:15
Speaker 1: so far as we can tell at present lead. But
48:19
Speaker 1: we cannot hasten it. I take ye man, whispered the
48:24
Speaker 1: chuckle headed lad, with his red hands tightening like a
48:29
Speaker 1: vice upon his knee. I take ye man. Go on, Oh,
48:34
Speaker 1: go on, the professor went on, after a little pause.
48:40
Speaker 1: Why is the change gradual, he asked. Why does only
48:44
Speaker 1: a minute fraction of the radium disintegrate at any particular second.
48:50
Speaker 1: Why does it dull itself out so slowly and so exactly.
48:55
Speaker 1: Why does not all the uranium change to radium, and
48:58
Speaker 1: all the radium changed to the next lowest thing at once?
49:03
Speaker 1: Why this decay by driblets? Why not a decay en mass?
49:07
Speaker 1: Suppose presently we find it is possible to quicken that decay.
49:13
Speaker 1: The chuckle headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful, inevitable idea
49:18
Speaker 1: was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin
49:22
Speaker 1: and swayed in his seat with excitement. Why not, he echoed,
49:27
Speaker 1: Why not? The professor lifted his forefinger. Given that knowledge,
49:33
Speaker 1: he said, mark, what we should be able to do.
49:38
Speaker 1: We should not only be able to use this uranium
49:41
Speaker 1: and thorium. Not only should we have a source of
49:44
Speaker 1: power so potent that a man might carry in his
49:48
Speaker 1: hand the energy to light a city for a year,
49:52
Speaker 1: fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our
49:57
Speaker 1: giant liners across the Atlantic. But we should also have
50:01
Speaker 1: a clue that would enable us, at last to quicken
50:05
Speaker 1: the process of disintegration in all the other elements where
50:10
Speaker 1: decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements.
50:15
Speaker 1: Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become
50:19
Speaker 1: an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do you realize, ladies
50:25
Speaker 1: and gentlemen, what these things would mean for us? The
50:28
Speaker 1: scrub head nodded, Oh, go on, go on. He would
50:33
Speaker 1: mean a change in human conditions that I can only
50:37
Speaker 1: compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that
50:41
Speaker 1: lifted man above the brute. We stand to day towards
50:46
Speaker 1: radioactivity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had
50:51
Speaker 1: learned to make it. He knew it then only as
50:55
Speaker 1: a strange thing, utterly beyond his control, a flare on
50:59
Speaker 1: the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured
51:03
Speaker 1: through the forest. So it is that we know radioactivity today. This,
51:10
Speaker 1: this is the dawn of a new day in human living,
51:13
Speaker 1: at the climax of that civilization which had its beginning
51:18
Speaker 1: in the hammered flint and the fire stick of the savage.
51:22
Speaker 1: Just when it is becoming apparent that our ever increasing
51:25
Speaker 1: needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy,
51:31
Speaker 1: we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization.
51:37
Speaker 1: The energy we need for our very existence, and with
51:40
Speaker 1: which nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality
51:46
Speaker 1: locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot
51:52
Speaker 1: pick that lock at present. But he paused, his voice
51:57
Speaker 1: sank so that everybody strained a little to hear him.
52:01
Speaker 1: We will. He put up that lean finger again, his
52:07
Speaker 1: solitary gesture, and then he said, then that perpetual struggle
52:14
Speaker 1: for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare
52:18
Speaker 1: surplus of nature's energies, will cease to be the lot
52:22
Speaker 1: of man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this
52:26
Speaker 1: civilization to the beginning of the next. I have no eloquence,
52:31
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's material
52:36
Speaker 1: destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert
52:40
Speaker 1: continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice. The
52:46
Speaker 1: whole world wants more eden. I see the power of
52:50
Speaker 1: man reach out among the stars. He stopped abruptly, with
52:55
Speaker 1: a catching of the breath that many an actor or
52:58
Speaker 1: orator might have envied. The lecture was over. The audience
53:04
Speaker 1: hung silent for a few seconds, sighed became audible, stirred, fluttered,
53:10
Speaker 1: prepared for dispersal. More light was turned on, and what
53:14
Speaker 1: had been a dim mass of figures became a bright
53:17
Speaker 1: confusion of movement. Some of the people signaled to friends,
53:21
Speaker 1: Some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer's
53:26
Speaker 1: apparatus and make notes of his diagram. But the chuckle
53:30
Speaker 1: headed lad with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed
53:34
Speaker 1: frittering away of the thoughts that had such inspired him.
53:39
Speaker 1: He wanted to be alone with them. He elbowed his
53:42
Speaker 1: way out, almost fiercely. He made himself as angular and
53:47
Speaker 1: bony as a cow, fearing lest someone should speak to him,
53:52
Speaker 1: lest someone should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm. He
53:58
Speaker 1: went through the streets with a rapt face, like a
54:02
Speaker 1: saint who sees visions. He had arms disproportionately long and
54:07
Speaker 1: ridiculous big feet. He must get alone, get somewhere high,
54:12
Speaker 1: out of all this crowding of commonness of everyday life.
54:17
Speaker 1: He made his way to the top of Arthur's seat,
54:21
Speaker 1: and there he sat for a long time in the
54:23
Speaker 1: golden evening sunshine, still except that, ever and again he
54:29
Speaker 1: whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in
54:33
Speaker 1: his mind. If he whispered, if only we could pick
54:39
Speaker 1: that lock. The sun was sinking over the distant hills.
54:44
Speaker 1: Already it was shorn of its beams, a globe of
54:48
Speaker 1: ruddy gold hanging over the great banks of cloud that
54:54
Speaker 1: would presently engulf it, Ugh, said the youngster. Oh, he
55:02
Speaker 1: seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement,
55:05
Speaker 1: and the red sun was there before his eyes. He
55:09
Speaker 1: stared at it, at first without intelligence, and then with
55:13
Speaker 1: a gathering recognition. Into his mind came a strange echo
55:18
Speaker 1: of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a stone age,
55:22
Speaker 1: savage dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred
55:27
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Yea old thing, he said, And his
55:33
Speaker 1: eyes were shining, and he made a kind of grabbing
55:37
Speaker 1: gesture with his hand. Yea old red thing will have
55:43
Speaker 1: ye yet, And of prelude,