A Conversation in the Galapagos: Mr. William Beebe and a Marine Iguana

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

NOVEMBER, 1925

BY EDMUND WILSON

MR. BEEBE. You are not afraid of me.

THE IGUANA. Why should I be? I have seen sea lions before and they have never done me any harm.

MR. BEEBE. The tropic-birds that come from the mainland to breed on the crater-slopes of Daphne have different ideas from you other inhabitants of the islands. They snap at me with their jagged red beaks when I try to go near their nests. They know that I am not a seal but a man, and they have had to do with men before.

THE IGUANA. We iguanas are the masters of life; we are afraid of nothing. The inferior caste of smaller lizards find the hawks rather troublesome, I believe; they are sometimes caught and eaten and are always getting nasty frights. But we iguanas know that there is nothing in the universe which can interfere with us. Lie down beside us here on the hot rock and enjoy a good stupefying doze.

MR. BEEBE. I would rather visit with you a little. I have come a long way to see you. I believe that you animals can help me to understand a mystery to the solution of which I am devoting my life; and as there are no other marine iguanas in the world I have naturally made a point of coming here.

THE IGUANA. I cannot help you. So far as I am concerned, everything is a mystery.

MR. BEEBE. You talk as my own race has long talked, but as we talk no longer. When my ancestors interrogated animals, their questions were merely rhetorical: they never expected them to be answered. ‘Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night . . . In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? . . . What the hammer, what the chain, Knit thy strength and forged thy brain ? ‘ The man who addressed the tiger in this fashion was resigned to the mystery; he became exalted in contemplating it. But I can no longer be content in the contemplation of something which I do not understand, and it is only in the clearing-up of mysteries that I taste my exaltation. I have come to put you a similar question, but I mean to make you answer it.

THE IGUANA. Your trouble is wasted; I have nothing to say. I can only recommend a warm siesta — the most satisfying thing in the world.

MR. BEEBE. Yet when the first of our investigators came among you, nearly a hundred years ago, you islanders gave him the clue to the labyrinth. Hitherto, as I say, we had been resigned to accept life as a mystery — to suppose that each of the different species of animals had been created separately by a miracle. But when the great Darwin visited these islands he observed that each had its special families, — its special tortoises, its special finches, its special plants, — each quite distinct from those of the other islands and from similar creatures on the mainland, yet so much alike that it occurred to him they might be descended from a common ancestor and the differences which he noticed between them might be the result of the different conditions under which they had been living in the different islands. It was as if the Galapagos had been arranged as a special simplified demonstration of the process by which species change.

THE IGUANA. We iguanas have always been the same and there is only one species of us. We are immutable.

MR. BEEBE. You are mistaken. If you were to travel inland, you would find an entirely different species, unlike you in habits, shape, and color. Where you have webbed feet and flattened tails, because you have to get about in the sea; where you have strongly developed claws, because you have to climb the rough rock, they have only such claws and such tails as they require for the easy savannas; and where you are black like your lava-beach, they are yellow like their cactus flowers. Yet you are the offspring of a common stock, and the differences which have arisen between you are the differences between sea and land.

THE IGUANA. I cannot accept that: we notice no differences arising. We don’t observe our color turning dark or our claws growing longer.

MR. BEEBE. They have done so, for all that. You know that you differ among yourselves. Well, Darwin saw that the iguanas with the flattest tails and the feet which tended most to be webbed would be in the most advantageous situation for supporting life on the shore because they would most easily be able to swim, and therefore best able to get seaweed to eat. They would survive the others and interbreed and perpetuate their characteristics, which would in time become intensified and the common property of the whole race. So, not only did it appear that two kinds of iguanas might be bred from the same ancestor, but also that all lizards, turtles, and snakes, with their three-chambered hearts and their scales, might have common parents, too; that even the whole race of reptiles, on the one hand, and the whole race of birds, on the other, — since your scales in their earliest stages look so much like their feathers, — might have sprung from a remoter father, whose skeleton, as a matter of fact, has been found. Why not, then, all we creatures with backbones and with nervous systems stemming from them? Why not all creatures with tubelike bodies? Why not all creatures that are born from cells and build their bodies up from cells? Why not, in short, all life? I, a man, as well as you, a lizard? The seaweed you live on, a plant, as well as you and me?

THE IGUANA. I cannot understand how beings so unlike each other as the seaweed, you, and myself could have been built up through such trifling differences as occur between different iguanas. After all, the tails of all the iguanas are of almost exactly the same length!

MR. BEEBE. You fail to realize how long a time this process has been going on. No one knows how many million generations may have gone to make an iguana. And I should also explain that, as a matter of fact, very wide variations from the ordinary type may appear suddenly without wanting. Some believe that these and not the small variations are what have brought about the change. So that, for all I know, your flattened tails may have come into being, as it were, overnight when a new brood was suddenly hatched that had them.

THE IGUANA. Then a miracle did occur.

MR. BEEBE. Not at all. The young iguana was once an egg, and the egg was once a tiny cell which multiplied by dividing and grew gradually into an iguana. The smallest accident to one of those cells at an early stage of the young iguana’s growth — a cell too few or a cell too many — might have produced an entirely different kind of animal.

THE IGUANA. What would be the cause of such an accident?

MR. BEEBE. That is what we are trying to find out. It may be that the place where the animal lives has a direct influence upon him, so that, instead of being merely the residuum of a sifting-out of the iguanas best adapted to the Galapagos coast, he is also the product of the direct moulding of the tides in which he swims, of the equatorial sun which warms him, and of the seaweed which forms his diet.

THE IGUANA. That’s all nonsense. You can see for yourself that these boulders around us here have been exposed to the same sunlight and sea and surrounded by the same seaweed as I; yet they have not changed into iguanas. You talk as if I were merely an adding-up of accidents and influences, whereas I am plainly a separate force in myself. I can assure you that, if I have been made, it is not the sun and the sea which have made me, but I who have made myself.

MR. BEEBE. Yet you must admit that the boulders and you have some characteristics in common: you are grayish-black like them, and their backs are dull and rough like yours. In fact, from a distance it is almost impossible to tell you apart.

THE IGUANA. But we can swim, crawl about, and lay eggs, whereas the boulder can do nothing. And we swim because we will to swim, crawl about because we will to crawl, and lay eggs because we will to perpetuate an incomparable species.

MR. BEEBE. Very well; but such a statement as that tells us investigators — us scientists — nothing. Even assuming that by willing to swim you eventually become able to and develop webs and flat tails for the purpose, it is our business to take that will apart and find out what it is really made of and how it really works.

THE IGUANA. My dear fellow, you are wasting your time. You will never master life that way. As one animal to another, I can only advise you to follow your instinct without worrying about what makes it work. That, is the great force that drives us — instinct! Let it carry you along from triumph to triumph! Let it guide you to the passionate enjoyment of the fullness of life! Just at present my instinct commands me to go to sleep, and I am sure you must feel the same yearning. (He closes his eyes.)

MR. BEEBE. ‘As one animal to another’— so you animals are always saying to me! One night at Panama, on my way here, I went hunting in the jungle and wore a jack light on my forehead. Everywhere I looked I saw the animals gazing at me with burning eyes. That was all I could see, — their eyes, which reflected the light from my lantern, — so that I shot a crayfish and a large toad, mistaking them for crocodiles, and almost fired at a spider under the impression that it was a possum. Amphibian, crustacean, mammal, and arachnid, — as we think ourselves so clever in distinguishing them, — they were all the same there, and if they had had jack lights like me they could not have told me from one of themselves. Here we are, I thought, all staring at one another with the same pairs of eyes, each with the same fear for his life — a lot of animals in a jungle! Yet I could see what they could not see, for I could see with the eyes of the mind — I could see both beyond and below them. I looked out upon a different universe from them and from you.

THE IGUANA (without opening his eyes). My own is quite good enough: there is everything necessary in it.

MR. BEEBE. None the less, since your eyes are closed to your own, consider mine for a moment. When you look out, you see only the barren coast and the level and quiet sea; when I approach, you think only of a sea lion

— another being, another will, like yourself. But when I look out I see a vast machine functioning with infinite complexity: for me iguana, ocean, and coast are all one interplay of parts. The solid scene dissolves into tiny objects each ten million million times as small through as the width of my littlefinger nail. I see two different kinds of these, which mutually attract each other, and one of which is whirling about the other at an unimaginable speed. In some cases, I see only one particle revolving around another; in other cases, almost a hundred arranged in as many as six successive rings with a group of both kinds at the centre, themselves in revolution. When one of the electrons, as we call them, shifts from one ring to another, it does so instantaneously and, if it shifts from a larger to a smaller ring, loses a certain amount of energy, which you see given off as light. The combined weight of the revolving electrons always equals the weight of the central group; but when the outside ring finds itself overcrowded by the number necessary to strike this balance, it allows the outer ring of another system, which has room for extra electrons, to take over a few; and the two atoms, as the systems are called, adjust themselves to each other’s movements and travel about together. The same thing happens when they find themselves with too few or too many electrons for their centres. I see, as a matter of fact, that all the atoms have combined in this way and that they have done so according to definite laws: some have twice the capacity for attraction of others and are able to attract two atoms of the kind which have least capacity for attraction; others only balance with three, and so on up to six. And beyond this there are certain kinds which, by internal attractions among groups, are able to combine in associations running into thousands.

I see the air about us made up of certain of these atom-groups — which we have named molecules — moving in straight lines very rapidly in every direction and continually colliding with one another; I see the ocean made up of some of the same groups in combination with certain others, but moving much less rapidly and beginning to stick together. In fact, the molecules themselves tend to combine as units, as many as sixty together, to form larger aggregations. I see the rocks we are sitting on built up of these larger groups fixed in regular formations called crystals, and I see our bodies composed of other aggregations in a more unstable condition, which is continually breaking down and re-forming between fluid and a state of jelly where the molecules have linked together in a network like foam. I have thirty million million such units in my body organized in a great community, — all reacting with each other and with the molecules that surround me, — some alive and performing their rhythms of agglutination and dissolution, others dead and pressed into service as scaffoldings and walls to form envelopes for the live ones. We call these cells; their average length is a five-hundredth of the width of my little-finger nail; I see them filled with a grayish jelly which is sprinkled with little grains and strung through with a net of threads stretched from the sides to a small body in the centre. Near the latter is a larger nucleus containing its own network, body, and grains. But in the community different kinds of cells are designed for different uses. All have breathing grains in them for the purpose of splitting up a certain kind of molecule, which we call oxygen, and supplying the cell with the separate atoms; but other grains perform different duties according to the function of the cell. Some store fat; others starch, for fuel in the muscles; some the material proper for nerves; some the material proper for eggs; others the colors of our skin, and so forth. I see similar kinds of cells banded together and collaborating in their office. These are tissues; some breathe, some breed, some enable you to move. They work together in your body in a manner which I understand extremely well, but which I have n’t time to rehearse here. What it amounts to is that the whole community are exchanging energy with the world outside and among themselves. The cells of the plants — like your seaweed here — have solid envelopes different from ours, and in the envelopes special grains which give the plants their greenish color and which take in energy directly from the sunlight. You cat the plants in order to acquire that energy, and with the aid of the oxygen from the air you convert it in turn into energy of your own which you discharge in your movements. We humans eat not only plants but other animals as well, and thus get the energy of the sun at third, instead of second, hand.

I see you and me and the seaweed situated, along with a great number of other beings, on the surface of a large solid mass of molecules of the crystallized sort nearly a thousand times as big around as this island is long — a body with a rocky crust and an iron core, almost spherical like the sun, as it looks to us from here, but caved-in somewhat on four faces, in which the oceans have collected. It has caved in because it is giving off energy, and as it does so its atoms are crowding closer, and as they do so the earth is shrinking; and it is roundish because it is revolving. It is revolving steadily about the sun, which is one million and three hundred times as large as it, along with seven other bodies of the same kind, as do the electrons around their centres, in a series of successive rings — except that here there is only one body in each ring, that each body continues in its course, and that all the courses are on the same level. The sun itself is spinning in space, and these other bodies are fragments broken off from it — as the moon is, in turn, from our earth. The planets go around the sun and the moon around the earth in this way because space is warped in the presence of matter, and in following a curve they are merely taking what is for them the straightest possible path, from which, once they are set going, they are unable to depart. I see no molecules and no atoms in this space, — our air is only a film about the earth, — but a medium different from those we know, incapable of being divided into parts, but through which energy is able to pass in the form of light and heat. As the other planets and the sun cool down, they are contracting like the earth; but the sun is still extremely hot and, where the atoms are in violent agitation, is giving out energy at. a terrific rate. In fact, we depend upon it for energy.

Beyond the system in which we find ourselves, I can see half a million other systems in different stages of the same process through which our own has passed or through which it has still to go, and a hundred million or more suns. These systems have collected in a larger system something the shape of this watch of mine, in which our own is situated slightly above the middle and close to one end. They are all moving in relation to one another, but I do not know precisely how: it seems to me that our own is headed at top speed toward a certain group of distant suns. The great system is probably itself moving as a unit and absorbing stars as it goes along. The space in which all this happens gives me the impression of being boundless, but, though I could probably travel through it. in any direction without actually arriving at a boundary, I have reason to believe that there is only a certain amount of it and that my impression of its infinity is an illusion. — I see that you are sound asleep and have not listened to one word I have been saying. But it has been a satisfaction to me to recapitulate all I know.

THE IGUANA (waking up). I have enjoyed listening to you very much. The gentle ebb and flow of your voice has had a soothing effect on my spirit like the surf against the shore, and the refrains which occurred from time to time lent a refinement of rhythm. You were humming a song when you first came up, and I felt that it had the same fine qualities. Both exercises were delightful expressions of the rhythm that we all feel — in eating, breeding, or respiration. Rhythm — that is the great thing!

MR. BEEBE. I gave you, then, no new view of the universe?

THE IGUANA. From what you had said I was under the impression that you were going to elucidate a mystery ; but in the little I listened to before I fell asleep I observed that you were basing your universe on mysteries even more extraordinary than those I urged you to accept. What, in fact, are those electrons you speak of, and what makes them rush about in that way? What, precisely, is that energy they release ? I am unable to imagine it. Electrons would evidently be live creatures like ourselves and therefore incomprehensible. But whereas I had supposed that only the animals were alive, you want to convince me that everything is. Furthermore, how is one to understand the behavior of beings which from revolving about a centre in one orbit appear instantaneously in another? Such a conception is against all my experience. When the birds which I see flying above me want to come down to the earth or the sea, they do so gradually and in an unbroken descent — they do not drop instantaneously. I cannot understand for the life of me why you sneer at the man who apostrophized the tiger when you appear to be satisfied with the mystery of the electron. Why could one not address to the electron — and with greater reason — a similar rhetorical question: ‘ Electron! Electron! circling swift, Who taught you that tremendous shift?’

MR. BEEBE. I am not satisfied with the mystery of the electron. I expect presently to find it out.

THE IGUANA. Take my word for it, you never will and you may as well give it up. The electron, if it exists, evidently follows its instinct like you and me. It is inspired by a will, a vital force. You may take an iguana or an atom apart — you may even take an electron apart. But how can you take an instinct apart? How can you take life apart? Let us put ourselves in harmony with this instinct — let us not hope to analyze it. I have a deep conviction that the life I experience is something incapable of being divided.

MR. BEEBE. We scientists cannot admit that. When the first voyagers used to navigate these seas three hundred years ago, they called this archipelago ‘the Enchanted Islands,’ because they knew so little about calculating distances that, when strong currents carried them out of their courses, they had the illusion of sailing straight over the places where the islands had formerly been. That is, they attributed to an unknown and unintelligible power something which they had merely not been clever enough to give its natural explanation. And that is the type of all scientific progress. To-day, our electrons which disappear from one orbit and instantaneously appear in another are inexplicable, like the Enchanted Islands, which were sometimes there and sometimes not. But we have found out the secret of the islands and we may find out the secret of the electron. As for what makes the electrons move, science has never pretended to deal with ultimate realities. We leave that to mystics like you. It is enough for us to know how they move. All that we scientists pretend to understand are the relations between realities, and why should we not understand even the relations involved in the processes of living bodies as well as the relations involved in the processes of the nonliving world? People used to imagine that life appeared spontaneously — like the Enchanted Islands again. They talked of bees suddenly springing into life in the bodies of dead animals and of mice generated from a piece of cheese and a pile of dirty rags; but now we understand how the bees and mice got there just as we understand how the islands got there. And who knows if we may not in time come to understand their genesis so well that we shall be able to construct bees and mice ourselves out of their component energy and atoms? We have already made impressive beginnings in this direction. Already we have produced out of nonliving materials artificial cells that look like real ones and that move, divide, and eat as if they were alive, and have caused artificial seeds to sprout and grow into the leaves and stalks of live water-plants. Already we have made a substance called formaldehyde, which is one of the systems of molecules built up by plants and which has always been supposed inseparable from living organisms, out of a nonliving gas passed through a nonliving salt in the presence of rays of sunlight; and by mixing certain crystals with certain liquids we have even created the living organisms called moulds. We have kept a piece of animal tissue alive by feeding it its accustomed diet five years after the body was dead. We have determined the sex of pigeons before they were hatched, and fertilized frogs’ eggs by pricking them with needles. And we have stimulated the ova of sea urchins to develop into eggs and hatch by supplying them artificially with the enveloping membrane which had formerly been contributed by the male!

THE IGUANA. Is that so? Well, I really cannot see what is the point of taking all that trouble. There are always plenty of water-plants. I have never known the supply to give out; and I am sure they reproduce themselves a great deal better than you can reproduce them. And as for mice, I cannot conceive why anybody should want to manufacture them!

MR. BEEBE. It is not that we want to manufacture mice, but that we want to recast human beings. If it is a question of mice, you have no idea how useful they are proving to us. By breeding ordinary mice, for example, with the kind that have a gift for waltzing, we have been able to find out the exact mathematical proportion according to which they inherit their peculiarity, and from this have come to hope that we may some day be in a position to trace the inheritance of our own characteristics. Furthermore, from experimenting with the embryos of rats we have reached the conclusion that it may be possible to gestate human embryos outside the womb of the mother and thus do away with the difficulties of birth, which are so much greater among us human mammals than among you iguanas, who have already developed a natural device for growing the offspring outside the body. May we not hope to find the seeds of human qualities among the bodies of the germinal cell? May we not hope to fertilize the ova and to rear the embryo outside the womb? And may we not therefore succeed in preserving and improving those of our qualities which we have decided are valuable and in destroying the others? May we not, in short, come to breed genius and virtue in human beings as we already can breed waltzing in mice?

THE IGUANA. I cannot understand this passion for changing yourselves. Are n’t you good enough as you are? I am sure that, for my part, it would never occur to me to try to tinker with the iguanas — they are perfectly satisfactory already.

MR. BEEBE. No, we humans are not satisfactory; there is always something wrong with us. In the first place, we frequently inhabit climates where there is so little food available that we are obliged to work extremely hard in order to have enough to eat, and where the weather is so unfavorable that we are obliged to construct elaborate shelters from it and to wear artificial skins. Those who do not care to cultivate animals and plants themselves or to manufacture houses or clothes are obliged to perform other kinds of labor in order to get enough precious metal to exchange for these commodities; and this latter class tends to huddle in large communities something like those of the bees and ants, except that they are not so well organized, for there are so many inhabitants and so little work that all kinds of ridiculous tasks have to be invented of which the products are either harmful or unnecessary, and even with these the competition is so great that many starve from having nothing to do and all who have work are compelled to use up their whole lives attending to it for fear it will be given to someone else. Furthermore, our cities are so densely built and so befogged with the gases from our workshops that they have ended by excluding the sunlight, upon whose energy all life depends. So that, as a rule, our city populations are overworked and undersunned. And we are so ill adapted to our natural conditions—let alone these artificial ones — that we are perpetually falling victim to all kinds of enfeeblements, insanities, and illnesses caused by our failure to cope with them. What seems the crowning gratuitous curse of our plight is the fact that we are surrounded by a poisonous race of invisible plantlike creatures which are always ready to fall upon us and devour us when the slightest weakness on the part of our tissues allows them an opening. With all these difficulties, we have become so quarrelsome that we are continually fighting one another individually and collectively, sometimes on a scale so great that whole races of men attack each other for some valuable source of food or money until both have been completely ruined. Now we scientists — aside from the possibilities which I suggested a moment ago — have already begun to find out how to remedy these misfortunes. One of our sciences studies communities and the distribution of money and food with a view to better organization; another studies the growth of plants and attempts artificially to produce the substances supplied by them, with a view to making our food as abundant and as easily accessible for us as your seaweed is for you. Another tries to straighten out the sad tangles in our minds which result from our natural desires for mating, pleasure, or relaxation, attempting to make their requirements felt in societies which have provided for them insufficiently. Another hunts down the bacteria which prey on us and invents means to destroy them; another stimulates our organs when they are weak and purifies them when they are poisoned; another takes them apart when they are out of order and sets them running properly again, grafts new tissues when the old have been torn away, and supplies new blood when the old is failing; and a fourth, when the atomic structure of our bodies has been thrown out of gear, readjusts it by the application of rays. Unfortunately we are the victims of an infectious stupidity which is perhaps our most serious plague of all, and which allows us to pervert the uses of our discoveries till they become the instruments of our undoing — so that out of our knowledge of molecules and atoms and our mastery of energy we have created machines to enslave and overstrain us and new weapons of unprecedented power to wage war on one another. But even this we may in time find remediable. Already by the stimulation of certain secretions in the recesses of our bodies we have found a means of advancing the idiotic to a normal condition. Who knows if we may not soon raise the normal to a condition of intelligence?

THE IGUANA. The more you say, the plainer it becomes to me that you men are hopelessly mistaken. The further you go along the lines you have been describing, the worse off you are certain to be. Your misfortune really lies, not in knowing too little and in not having rearranged things enough, but in ever having embarked on researches which are obviously destined to be incomplete, and in attempting to tamper with your souls and bodies before you really understand them — which, believe me, you never will. What you need is to return to the natural state — from which you never should have departed. How do you know, for example, that before you have succeeded in stimulating the rest of humanity to think the same thoughts that you think and to see their salvation as you do — which in itself sounds improbable — they may not already have slaughtered the whole race, including you, in one of their scientific wars? In the meantime, in any case, you fall sick, you starve, you die before your time — you are excessively unhappy. Now those are things that never happen to us iguanas. We follow Nature’s divine decrees and we are never troubled by those ‘ sad tangles ‘ of which you speak, which result from the repression of natural desires. We enjoy ourselves, we mate, we relax. In the morning, in our comfortable burrows we come to life with the waking of the light; then we lie about on some favorite rock till the waters have withdrawn from the seaweed; we lounge down and munch it fresh from the surf — wet, slimy, and delicious. Then all day, as you see us here, we bask in the warm luscious sun. Go back to Nature I Live as we do! You talk a great deal, like the birds; but it is plain from your own description that you live primarily to pursue the same ends as they and as we — you wish to eat, to enjoy the sunshine, to perpetuate your kind. If you find yourselves in a sunless climate and with a scarcity of nourishment, that is very regrettable. I advise you to move to our country, where there is room for so many more. Only, if you do, kindly leave us alone. Do not try to put us together differently; do not stimulate our secretions. You would only distress us and make us sick. Iguana nature never changes and we do not want to have it change!

MR. BEEBE. Does it not? I have seen the skeletons of lizards twenty times as large as you, twenty times the largest of your species! — obviously offshoots, in the remote past, of some common ancestor with you. Would you tell me in the face of those monstrous skeletons — articulated exactly like your own — that your nature had never changed? I could show you at the top of my own brain the last useless vestiges of an eye which has disappeared in me but which still survives in you to the degree that a certain scale in the middle of your forehead wears the image of its retina and lens, and when you are asleep and I pass my hand before it you become aware of it at once; and I could show you in the embryos of both our races the gillclefts of the water-breathing beings from which we have both sprung! What sort of creature was I when I had an eye in the middle of my forehead? What sort of creature were you when you breathed through gills? Neither a lizard nor a man! We were perhaps the same creature then. But have we not changed since that time? You are right — we all have the same nature; but the characteristic of that nature is to change! Your ancestors changed to dinosaurs — that is, they became enormously strong — and they must have had the mastery of their world. But when the climate turned from warm to cold, their strength did not help them to cope with it and they perished, every one. Now we men, when we in turn took our flight from a different stock from yours, developed a more effectual means of dealing with the treacheries of the globe. We became, not strong, but skillful — we hit upon the use of tools. You other animals had been under the necessity of growing the tools you needed yourselves— your wings, your oars, your diving-helmets, your electric batteries, your lights, your weapons to defend yourselves, and your traps to catch your prey. It takes you a long time to acquire these things, and the number you can manage at one time is very limited. But we humans found out how to make these instruments out of the materials of the inanimate world, and so could command them all at once because we could pick them up when they were wanted and lay them down when we were done. And this genius may carry us far.

I told you that we were always maladjusted; the truth is that we can adjust ourselves more successfully — that is, to more kinds of environment — than any other creature that has ever lived. You must consider the difficulty of what we try to do; then our achievement will become impressive. Yet we must work at our tools day and night. And that is the scientist’s purpose. Despite other men who are content, like you iguanas, to eat and sleep and enjoy the sun, to look no further than their own deaths, and to cultivate the enjoyment of their sensations, or to put blind confidence in the instincts which stir us and in the energy which moves us all, he knows that we must be saved through abstract thought and through the construction of machines — lest we be caught by some new trick of Nature or some perversity of our own before we are ready to deal with it, and the conquest of matter be all to be begun again by some new race with a new genius, while only degenerate members of our own live on, all their fine aspirations given up, as you iguanas in stupid indifference watch us sail the seas and drain the marshes where your family were once supreme. Not the artist nor the prophet shall save us, but the scientist, for he alone handles the tools. The artist and the prophet, like him, chafe at their existence on this impossible earth where they are half masters and half slaves. Like him, they hear the voice which torments us all: ‘Not good enough! Not good enough!’ But the artist can turn all his chagrin into a beautiful and satisfying work of art and so be relieved of it; and the prophet can hope that what we lack on earth will be made up to us after we have died. Both can assert, like any iguana, that human nature never changes and that they would not have it change. But the scientist has seen it change and knows it must change as much again — as much again and more! Then, then, we shall have a real world like the dreamed worlds of our prophets and poets — a world which has passed not only through man’s mind but also through his hands! In that day we shall no longer have to compensate ourselves by the falsehoods of our imagination for the mutilations of our bodies and the starvations and frustrations of our souls. Living in a universe which is itself the masterpiece of our imagination, our common speech and the songs which we improvise in the enjoyment of our strength and our power would make the utterances of our Dantes and Beethovens sound like the stammerings of barbarians! And in that day our saints would stand ashamed to have bought sainthood with suffering!

THE IGUANA. Your Beethovens, your Darwins, and your Dantes do not matter to me. It is growing dark — I must get home to my burrow. (He begins to crawl away.)

MR. BEEBE. Yes. The earth, turning away its face, hides the ball of the sun from our eyes; and the light, striking through earth’s film, streams divided in purple and green. But you shall not go back to your burrow — you shall come with me! (He lassoes the Iguana with a cord.)

THE IGUANA. What do you want to do with me?

MR. BEEBE. You must help me to attain that triumph!

THE IGUANA. If, as you say, the sun is burning out and you depend upon it for life, where will your triumph be when the sun is dead and the earth cold?

MR. BEEBE. Look! Behind us a million suns begin to shine in the eastern sky, all burning like our own. We shall have those down to warm us when our own has given out!

THE IGUANA. That strikes me as a remote hope — if their sizes are what you represent them. Only a mystic faith like mine, I am sure, could inspire a thought so unscientific. In that faith, let us go to our beds; let us sleep on the divine mystery. There is nothing so comforting or so delicious in the world as falling asleep in a cool burrow.

MR. BEEBE. While we sleep we prepare our children’s ruin. Since you have done nothing to save yours, you shall help me to save mine! (He carries him off by the tail.)

THE IGUANA. I go unwillingly!