Their grandchildren?
Impossible! In regard to the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth generation, it is useless even to dream.
"One _will_ dream of it, nevertheless, and perhaps there is no man who has not said to himself at least once in his life: 'If I could but come to life again in a couple of centuries!' One would wish to return to earth to seek news of his family; another, of his dynasty.

A philosopher is anxious to know if the ideas that he has planted will have borne fruit; a politician, if his party will have obtained the upper hand; a miser, if his heirs will not have dissipated the fortune he has made; a mere land-holder, if the trees in his garden will have grown tall.

No one is indifferent to the future destinies of this world, which we gallop through in a few years, never to return to it again.

Who has not envied the lot of Epimenides, who went to sleep in a cave, and, on reopening his eyes, perceived that the world had grown old?
Who has not dreamed, on his own account, of the marvellous adventure of the sleeping Beauty in the wood?
"Well, ladies, Professor Meiser, one of the least visionary men of the age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years--arrest all the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual against the action of time for a century or two, and afterwards resuscitate him." "He was a fool then!" cried Madame Renault.
"I wouldn't swear it.

But he had his own ideas touching the main-spring which moves a living organism.