World atavism

By Edmond Hamilton
Author of The Universe Wreckers, The Other Side of the Moon, etc.
Illustrated by PAUL
The sun's rays have been credited with many beneficial powers. It is a universally conceded fact that the sun is necessary to good health; not only because of its warmth-giving rays, but also because of some other element, directly a health-giving factor, which has since been more or less successfully duplicated in the laboratory—in the form of Alpine lamps and what not. It is also said, however, that there are certain properties in the rays of the sun which might be used as life-giving rays. As far as we know, nothing definite has been established on this score yet. Who knows what other helpful possibilities are hidden in the various ether vibrations produced by the sun? Edmond Hamilton has a brand new idea, which he elaborates and weaves into a fascinating story of scientific fiction. Certainly it seems to us to be of absorbing interest.
FOREWORD
I write these words in a room perched high in one of New York's highest towers. Beneath me, in the fading sunlight of late afternoon, there stretches the vast mass of the mighty city's structures. New York it is—but such a New York as never man looked upon before. And it is with its familiar but infinitely strange panorama before my eyes that I start now this record of the great change.
My name is Allan Harker. Dr. Allan Harker, I could say, for it has been seven years since I took the degree and with it a position on the biological staff of Manhattan University. That was a great day for me. Manhattan was one of the most renowned of eastern universities, and its biological department in particular was known to scientists the world over. This was due not only to the department's unrivalled equipment, but also in greater part to two of the scientists who worked in it, Dr. Howard Grant, head of the department, and Dr. Raymond Ferson, his associate. Very proud I was to have won so soon the opportunity of working with those two world-famed biologists. And even prouder I was when, in the next years, my work came gradually to link my name with theirs.