“If they can put together the material for a hen’s egg,” said I, “what’s the trouble with hatching a chicken out of it.”
“They can make all of the egg except the germ. That has been proved in this way. They take the germ out of a real hens egg, and put it into a shell filled with the artificial food, then apply the proper temperature and it is hatched in the usual time and all the food consumed. This is a common experiment.”
“That is good proof that their food is the right material for chicks at any rate.”
“Well there is plenty of scientific proof of the correctness of all the different modifications. Analyses have repeatedly been made of human bodies of different ages and their exact constituents with their proportions ascertained and thus it is known precisely what they require for food. And when this is taken with a sufficient quantity of distilled or electrically purified water there is no liability of being hungry and little of being sick. At any rate the general health and regularly increasing longevity of the people proves better than any theorizing the general correctness of their way of life. There is no longer any such thing as a patent medicine, a pill, or a powder, and there are no medical practitioners. There are surgeons; and there are scientific chemical professors, whose advice regarding the proper food is sometimes asked. But almost all distempers they are liable to, are rectified by self treatment; study of hygiene and the conditions of animal life being taught in the schools, not in a sciolous or smattering way but thoroughly and scientifically; for they say no knowledge is so essential to all people as this. It is by using scientifically adapted food that they have succeeded in extending the average duration of life, and they claim that they will yet raise it to a thousand years. They are right in saying that decay and death from old age are due to the clogging up of the system with foreign matter that can neither be assimilated and taken into the tissues, nor ejected from the system. Their remedy for this is the prevention of the introduction of such substances by keeping them entirely out of the food. This they have nearly succeeded in doing, since the body is no longer the tenement of a chemical works to so very large an extent, as it used to be. Manufacture of these deleterious residuums inside the body is nearly stopped. The intelligent selection of the food then, with cleanliness and protection from cold constitute the principles of their treatment. Epidemic diseases have long since been entirely abolished.
“The organic germs that caused these diseases depended on swamps, stagnant pools, and decaying animal and vegetable matter for nests in which to be cultivated, and from such places they were conveyed by the air or water and so reached the fluids of the human body in which their further cultivation went on, to the great grief of your race. Now there is not a swamp nor any such thing in all the world, and nothing whatever is allowed to decay. Everything that grows is either utilized or cremated. All refuse from the numerous chemical works is treated electrically and returned to the soil as a fertilizer. The water in their sewers is often not so very much worse than that which used to run in your water pipes, but it is all electrically treated and the precipitated sediment returned to the land while only the clear water is turned into the rivers.”
“I suppose they no longer keep domestic animals,” said I.
“They no longer keep them for use to any great extent, but they have preserved specimens of all the domestic animals, and some of those that were wild in your day as objects of curiosity. They also have some in the country as pets. There are a few wild animals in some of the large state parks that having never been disturbed have practically tamed themselves. Animal power passed out of use ages ago. The people are scrupulously nice in their ideas of cleanliness and so no animals of any sort, not even canary birds are allowed in the cities. In this respect they look back with unlimited disgust upon the people of your day with their filthy horses and dogs perambulating and befouling the streets, their stables, stores and meat shops full of the odors of decaying vegetable and animal matter, their accumulations of ashes and cinders and dust, and of filth and garbage in foul cess pools, barrels, gutters, vaults and sewers, their personal habits of eating and drinking with their sequelae and the necessary cooking and dishwashing, and their smoking and tobacco chewing and spitting. All this is done away with, and the people can hardly understand a mode of life in which it was included; much less necessary.
“The streets of the cities are as clean as a drawing room, and it is easy to keep them so since there is so little occasion for them being soiled.