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technological accomplishments, should still be in such great need of protection from these forces?”
    “No,” said Bascomb; “biology teaches us that man was forced to develop auxiliary protections because of his inherent physical weakness. That’s what’s made him great; out of weakness has come his strength.”
    “And what basis is there for such a preposterous assumption?” Magruder showed angry excitement for the first time. “How could Man have reached the top of the evolutionary ladder if he dropped his natural, physical protective devices, one by one, as he developed? Can you think of a hypothesis more absurd than this one? Wouldn’t he, rather, have accumulated survival instruments instead of dropping them?”
    “He did,” said Bascomb, “his brain—which enables him to devise any means of protection and development that he needs.”
    “And that’s an improvement, I suppose! A device to manufacture out of cmde metal and glass the instruments possessed for fifty to a hundred million years by other species. The swift knows with unerring accuracy die way to go to avoid an oncoming storm, and its temporarily-abandoned young go into hibernation when it comes. But human beings still don’t know which way to duck a hurricane; and the ones caught in it die.
    “For fifty million years bats have navigated by sonar. An eel-like fish of the Nile uses true electromagnetic radar. But Man is just now getting around to clumsy mechanical duplicates of these devices. Birds and animals use the polarization of daylight to determine direction and time. Man still hasn’t got a really practical device for duplicating this feat.
    “The homing ability of the ‘lower species’ is traditional. We use ‘bird-brain’ as a term of insult—but it takes quite a few tons of iron and glass even to approach a duplication of the functions of a two or three ounce bird brain.” “Are you suggesting, then,” said Bascomb with a superior smile, “that Main should take a backward step and pick up some of the abilities of his distant forebears?”
    “Is it anything to boast of that Man lacks the abilities of the lower species?” Magruder snapped. “Actually, they’re not lost; Man doesn’t have to go back. What I’m suggesting is that he merely bring into full play those abilities he has—for he does indeed stand at the top of the evolutionary ladder!
    “Man’s homing ability is superior to that of the pigeon, or of the elephant, fish, or bat—which have it in abundance. His natural radar sense excels that of the Nile fish; his sonar is better than that found in bats and rats. And his prescience of disaster far outdistances that of the swift.”
    “You mean we have all these mechanisms, unused, within the structure of our bodies?”
    Magruder shook his head. “No. The mechanisms we see in the lower species are clumsy experimental models. In Man, Nature has installed the final production model which incorporates all the prior successes without their bugs, as I believe an engineer would say it.
    “This final production model we call ‘intuition.’ ” Bascomb choked; for a moment he felt like laughing out loud. He had a flashing vision of Sarah before him— arms akimbo and lips pressed tightly while she exclaimed, “I don’t care what you say, Charles Bascomb, I know what’s right, and that’s the way it’s going to be done!”
    It made no difference what ‘it’ was. Sarah’s feeling of just knowing could be applied to anything.
    And then Bascomb had a mental picture, too, of Mrs. Davidson and Mrs. Harpersvirg, and Dr. Sherridan.
    He permitted only a faint smile as he finally answered, “You believe you have tamed man’s ability to do things by hunch and guesswork?”
    “Unreasonable, isn’t it?” said Magruder. “It helps just a little if you use the proper terminology, however. Intuition is a definite, precise faculty of the human organism; evolutionwise, it stands at the peak of all those faculties we