Dire Threats Of Science

Wonderful things are going to be done by the development of synthetic chemistry between now and the year 2,000, if Professor Berthelot, the French savant, is to be believed. The food and drink . producing animáis and vegetables vvill not then be encouraged to exist for human Ufe, but food and drink will be manufactured direct and to order by man himself, and served in highly concentrated tablets, vest-pocket size. A person may then carry about him two or three table d'hote dinners complete, froin blue point oysters or little necl clams to crackers, cheese and coffee, and tobáceo, and with all his wine and cognac included. This chango will be brought abuut, it is said, by the remarkable progress being made in compounding food and drink from their constituent elements - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. It has advanced so far already that the preparation of beefsteak from its elements is assured, and nicotine, the essential principie of tobáceo, has been produced from coal tar. Life, indeed, would not be worth the living should the professor have his way. The ready-made tablets of food and drink would be horribly alike to the eye, the taste, and the understanding; eating and drinking would be purely mechanical; good fellowship and wit and irnagination would depart and existence would be utterly material and dull.