In that
day the icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing
them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten
blotting-paper. There is no respect now of Handel nor of Shakespeare;
the works of Rembrandt and Bellini fossilise at the bottom of the sea.
Grace, beauty, and wit, all that is precious in music, literature, and
art--all gone. In the morning there was Europe. In the evening there
are no more populous cities nor busy hum of men, but a sea of jagged ice,
a lurid sunset, and the doom of many ages. Then shall a scared remnant
escape in places, and settle upon the changed continent when the waters
have subsided--a simple people, busy hunting shellfish on the drying
ocean beds, and with little time for introspection; yet they can read and
write and sum, for by that time these accomplishments will have become
universal, and will be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk; but
they do so as a matter of course, and without self-consciousness. Also
they make the simpler kinds of machinery too easily to be able to follow
their own operations--the manner of their own apprenticeship being to
them as a buried city. May we not imagine that, after the lapse of
another ten thousand years or so, some one of them may again become
cursed with lust of introspection, and a second Harvey may astonish the
world by discovering that it can read and write, and that steam-engines
do not grow, but are made? It may be safely prophesied that he will die
a martyr, and be honoured in the fourth generation.
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