Notwithstanding all the arguments of advanced scientists, the food-chemists failed in disestablishing the old-fashioned system of eating and drinking.
Moreover there were physiologists who declared that it was an impossibility as man is constituted, to sustain life by means of elemental substances being introduced into the system unless a complete reconstruction of the organisation could be effected.
For the various organs that acted together, forming a laboratory for the change of foodstuffs into vital force, having no occupation must necessarily languish, and get out of gear through sheer inanition.
Thus the revolution in animal economy was perforce left over for the people of a more advanced period to deal with.
PART III
The nineteenth century saw the development of natural science to such a gigantic extent that the people could only exclaim—‘It is like reading a fairy tale of double-distilled enchantment; Aladdin’s lamp is as nothing compared with it!’
Great as was the civilisation of the ancients their genius had never attained to such heights as were reached by the scientists of that epoch.
Electricity was impounded into the service of man, and put to every possible purpose.
Experiment and research continued to be the order of the day; and the great glow of enthusiasm that fired the votaries of science never abated until all that was possible to be learnt concerning the adaptations of electric energy were known far and wide. Before the dawn of the twentieth century every country on the face of the earth was bound together by a network of electrical energy.
Scientific knowledge had therefore made such vast progress all over the world, and the uses to which electric force could be applied had become so widely known that nations found they must settle their differences by some method other than warfare.