As a matter of fact, the mammoth has gone, the woolly rhinoceros of Northern Europe has gone, the sabre-toothed tiger prowls no more. Even wolves have disappeared, and the mosquito is still flourishing in his millions and billions.
We have only just learned that it is he who gives us malaria, that it is he who spreads yellow fever and undoubtedly many other diseases.
The human race, which in its earliest, incapable childhood easily managed to dispose of the mammoth and his huge fellow-monsters, still stands helpless before the little mosquito, deadliest of VISIBLE animals on earth.
Is it not interesting to realize that the hardest work of the human race, as of the individual, is the most minute work; that the intellect, which easily copes with the heaviest and the biggest problems, is baffled by the tiniest?
Ultimately, and perhaps soon, we shall send the mosquito, the house-fly and the other buzzing pirates to join in the grave's silence their big brothers—the mastodon and the rest.
Then our fight will begin against invisible animal life, against the actual microbes of disease which the mosquito has been carrying around and injecting into us. It is a long fight, but, of course, we shall win it. ——
And is it not interesting, also, to reflect that in the moral, as in the physical, battles of life man requires the longest time to deal with his smallest enemies?
Morally we are still primitive savages. We are still combating murder, arson, theft—like the cave-dweller fighting the physical mammoth, we are fighting the mammoths of moral deformity.
Eventually they will disappear. Murder will be unknown, and theft, rendered unnecessary by decent social organization, will have disappeared also.
At that time we shall be fighting the smaller and more dangerous, more elusive and more persistent moral troubles—HYPOCRISY, CONCEIT, UNCHARITABLENESS. These are the mosquitoes and flies of the world of immorality that will pursue us when the big fellows—murder and theft—shall have been killed off.