[“The descendants of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shrivelled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.”—Pall Mall Gazette, abridged.]
What, a million years hence, will become of the Genus
Humanum, is truly a question vexed;
At that epoch, however, one prophet has seen us
Resemble the sketch annexed.
For as Man undergoes Evolution ruthless,
His skull will grow “dome-like, bald, terete”;
And his mouth will be jawless, gumless, toothless—
No more will he drink or eat!
He will soak in a crystalline bath of pepsine,
(no Robert will then have survived, to wait,)
And he’ll hop on his hands as his food he steps in—
A quasi-cherubic gait!
No longer the land or the sea he’ll furrow;
The world will be withered, ice-cold, dead
As the chill of eternity grows, he’ll burrow
Far down underground instead.
If the Pall Mall Gazette has thus been giving
A forecast correct of this change immense,
Our stars we may thank, then, that we shan’t be living
A million years from hence!
This was forwarded to me by Malcom Farmer, another DPer, who provides many of the issues of Punch to DP and Project Gutenberg. He also contributed the H. G. Wells book of collected essays that I wrote about previously, which includes the essay referenced by the poem.
(Now if we just had the Pall Mall Gazette, we could close the set.)
I found the image quite modern-looking, and somehow familiar. When did egg-headed, small-mouthed, big-eyed (and ostensibly superior) beings start appearing in our collective conscious?
Two years later, the St. Louis Republic had a slightly different, though no less disturbing, view of what man would be like in 1,000,000 A. D. Which do you prefer?
2 comments ↓
Well, this whole meme has to be post-Darwin, with its underlying basis that we aren’t the last word in the history of animal life on this planet. What if Wells invented it? The War of the Worlds and its Martians has been a particularly pervasive and persistent source for ideas of aliens in the 20th century.
Besides the idea of big-brained, big-eyed, tiny-bodied evolved humans, the source article is an example of the “dying sun” idea, derived from Lord Kelvin’s calculations on the possible energy source of the sun: lacking a theory of atomic energy, calculations gave the sun an extremely short lifespan of a few tens of million years. Given the length of time required to evolve existing humans, the future was not bright in a literal or metaphorical sense. Wells’ evolved humans have retreated to the interior of the earth for shelter against the spreading cold–of course, the most famous example of the Sun going out is that classic of Edwardian weird fiction, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land
(for the record: The Night Land)
I had forgotten the “dying sun” thing. I looked through my archives and stuff not yet posted and I don’t have anything on it (so far), but I’m sure there must have been some sort of revival of the idea, especially in the fin-de-siecle period.
As I thought about the idea of humans evolving into big-heads, though, I remembered that coelacanths have been around a few hundred million years with little change (not that Wells or anybody in the 19th C. would have known that) — perhaps humans are more like them and less like bacteria (some of which adapt/evolve at frightening speed).
Or perhaps not.