Rocks Ahead!

1.—The Science Course.

There was a time when I was proud to be one of the Lords of Creation—when I gazed from man's high throne, in scorn upon the world beneath, and saw the birds and beasts and fishes, and the trees that grew from the lifeless soil. I gloried in the thought that those beautiful things of earth were my slaves and I was their master.

But now my pride is humbled, and I am the master no more, but rather the very slave of a million slaves: for there came a day when in my glory I sought to tear aside the veil that drapes the shrine of wisdom.

There I met with some of the hidden mysteries of life. I learnt that man, instead of being the ruler of living things, is but a monkey out of time and his blood-brothers still swing from bough to bough and chatter in the tree-tops.

I saw part of his mind as it lay dissected in the laboratory—and the Psychologist told me a tale of responses to stimuli, and conditioned reflexes. I found that many of his emotions come from his stomach, and that the secretions of funny little things called glands made up his loves and hates—or so the Chemist said.

I realised that I was one of those things, too—and, alas! a student of Science.

E.F.H.