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journalese precursor of a new and hardier race whose influence in the world I suspect will prove much greater. Like the modern prophets generally, he has substituted for revelation and intuition a thorough-going reliance upon the mundane intellect, fed upon scientific generalizations and historical particularities. Mr Bernard Shaw is another of the transition prophets, having marked affinities to the new Biological School; but, like the rest, is transitional in lacking the regalia of office and authority with which the newer prophets are endowed.

The first of the prophets of the twentieth-century school was Mr J. B. S. Haldane. In Daedalus we find a frank abandonment of the pose of scientific reserve about the future. Scientists generally for long had said that they were concerned only with verifiable facts. Newton, in particular, had said quite publicly that he had no use for hypotheses; and his successors for the sake of their reputations had to keep up the Newtonian manner. To distinguish themselves from journalists and philosophers they avoided speculation like a plague. Now Haldane found himself, I imagine, somewhat unduly constrained by this taboo. Pursuing the most rigid methods of inquiry, he had come to conclusions about some probable developments in the future, conclusions much less speculative than many of the things it was his duty as a biologist to teach about the past. So he prophesied.

The relief in the scientific world was heartfelt and instantaneous. Scientists and others, of various degrees of eminence, literally scrambled into Mr Haldane’s bus. In the year or so that followed some twenty prophetic volumes had been produced, and the publishers tell us of many others in the press.

However, in many of these documents we fail to detect the authentic guiding hand, and these uncanonical works we must leave to the Higher Critics of the future. The genuine prophet is to be known by his strictly impersonal manner. He tells you neither what he wants nor what he