the sun at noon
-- mystery of mysteries ! `` At the back of your brain is a little speck of perishable matter , Barty ; it is no bigger than a needle 's point , but it is bigger in you than in anybody else I know , except in Leah ; and in your children it is bigger still -- almost as big as the point of a pin ! `` If they pair well , and it is in them to do so if they follow their inherited instinct , their children and their children 's children will have that speck still bigger . When that speck becomes as big as a millet-seed in your remote posterity , then it will be as big as in a Martian , and the earth will be a very different place , and man of earth greater and even better than the Martian by all the greatness of his ampler , subtler , and more complex brain ; his sense of the Deity will be as an eagle 's sense of the sun at noon in a cloudless tropical sky ; and he will know how to bear that effulgence without a blink , as he stands on his lonely summit , ringed by the azure world . `` Indeed , there will be no more Martians in Mars by that time ; they are near the end of their lease ; all good Martians will have gone to Venus , let us hope ; if not , to the Sun itself ! `` Man has many thousands of years before him yet ere his little ball of earth gets too cold for him ; the little speck in his brain may grow to the size of a pea , a cherry , a walnut , an egg , an orange ! He will have in him the magnetic consciousness of the entire solar system , and hold the keys of time and space as long and as far as the sun shines for us all -- and then there will be the beginning of everything .