They prepare for
the worst._
PYGMALION. My friends: I will omit the algebra--
ACIS. Thank God!
PYGMALION [_continuing_]--because Martellus has made me promise to do
so. To come to the point, I have succeeded in making artificial human
beings. Real live ones, I mean.
INCREDULOUS VOICES. Oh, come! Tell us another. Really, Pyg! Get out. You
havnt. What a lie!
PYGMALION. I tell you I have. I will shew them to you. It has been done
before. One of the very oldest documents we possess mentions a tradition
of a biologist who extracted certain unspecified minerals from the earth
and, as it quaintly expresses it, 'breathed into their nostrils the
breath of life.' This is the only tradition from the primitive ages
which we can regard as really scientific. There are later documents
which specify the minerals with great precision, even to their atomic
weights; but they are utterly unscientific, because they overlook the
element of life which makes all the difference between a mere mixture of
salts and gases and a living organism. These mixtures were made over
and over again in the crude laboratories of the Silly-Clever Ages; but
nothing came of them until the ingredient which the old chronicler
called the breath of life was added by this very remarkable early
experimenter.
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