Word: joel
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During the midnight hours while the S. S. Dumbea swelters through the tropic heat of the Suez Canal, two sweat-drenched passengers turn in their steamer-chairs, begin to talk. One is a U. S. scientist, Joel, the other an Anglican missionary priest. As befits the steaming trough, bordered by desert horizons, in which they find themselves, their talk treats of life's early beginnings, Man's ends and possible...
Some 400 million years ago a fish dug its head into the mud, began to breathe with lungs, explains Joel. Next natural development would have been for it to be able to crawl out on land, but the lungfish never got that far. The only benefit it got from its lungs was the ability to live through periods of drought. Encysted in sun-baked mud it could live on air and its own tissues for months, even for years. From the papyrus roots of Lake Victoria Joel two years prior had collected specimens of the fish, called Kamongo...
...evolutionary futility of the gradually disappearing lungfish looks to the Anglican priest like a crack in the Divine Plan. Joel does his best to widen the crack by comparing Man's brain to Kamongo's lung, both ingenious developments, neither leading anywhere much. Joel likens life to whirlpools in a stream of energy, likens the living matter of cells and bodies to inorganic rubbish whirlpool-caught. The gyroscopic adjustment of the whirlpool to obstacles in its course gives an illusion of intelligent purpose to the rubbish it holds together. Really, all the purpose animating the rubbish is to spin...
Against these arguments the priest advances only feeble opposition, does not use the dialectic resources of the Church. When Joel calls life "an eddy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics'' the priest does not draw attention to the Virgin Birth. But the scientist's ratiocinations leave him unconvinced. When the anchor-chain grates overboard at Port Said, Joel finds the out-argued priest sticking to his divine guns still. Joel cannot figure him out. Also he sweats less than Joel, does not seem to mind the stewing heat. He is a queer fish too. Kamongo...
...theatre with his wife aboard a street car; in Philadelphia. Self-made, he obtained his first job (flagman of a section gang) from the late President Rea of Pennsylvania R. R., then a track supervisor. He joined the Reading in 1897, became president in 1918. White House Physician Joel Thompson Boone is his nephew...