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Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring.
The really surprising thing is not their number, but the infrequency with which they give rise to serious trouble. The human automobile is not only astonishingly well built, with all the improvements that hundreds of thousands of generations of experience have been able to suggest, but it is self-repairing, self-cleaning, and self-improving. It never lets itself get out of date.
It is not enough for the body to be able to take care of itself, and preserve a fair degree of efficiency in health, under what might be termed favorable or average circumstances, but it must also be prepared to protect itself and regain its balance in disease. The human automobile in its million-year endurance-run has had to learn to become self-repairing; and well has it learned its lesson.
Scarce an invention that has not slain a god, scarce a discovery has not marked the burying-place of a discarded deity. Criticism reduced the gods in number and limited them in power. Advancing knowledge pushed them back till nature, "rid of her haughty lords," is conceived as a huge mechanism, self-acting, self-adjusting, and self-repairing.
If the strings of a musical instrument were self-repairing, we might perhaps be induced to think that the material which fed the strings was the cause of the music, since in that case some measure of the waste would probably be discoverable in the débris emitted; and we might imagine that the débris was the measure of the music, while what it really was, was the measure of the waste of the strings, when they were made the instrument of the music.
Thus the organism may protect itself against temperature and other influences, against injury, making damages good again by self-repairing processes, “regenerating” lost organs, and sometimes even building up the whole organism anew from amputated parts.
Generations ago this self-balancing, self-repairing power was recognized by the more thoughtful fathers in medicine and even dignified by a name in their pompous Latinity the vis medicatrix naturæ, the healing power of nature.
It is automatic, self-lubricating, self-repairing and goes on, year after year, in fair weather or foul, turning out its brand of juicy pulp, done up charmingly in little yellow packages. How does it operate? How does it always manage to get the necessary raw materials from the earth and the air?
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