 CHAPTER XII. The language of the Vrilya is peculiarly interesting, because it seems to me to exhibit with great clearness the traces of the three main transitions through which language passes in attaining the perfection of form. One of the most illustrious of recent philologists, Max Muller, in arguing for the analogy between the strata of language and the strata of the earth, lays down this absolute dogma. Quote, No language can, by any possibility, be inflectional without having passed through the agglutinative and isolating stratum. No language can be agglutinative without clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum of isolation. End quote, on the stratification of language, page 20. During then the Chinese language as the best existing type of the original isolating stratum, quote, as the faithful photograph of man in his leading strings trying the muscles of his mind, groping his way, and so delighted with his first successful grasps that he repeats them again and again, end quote, Max Muller, page 3. We have, in the language of the Vrelia, still clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum the evidences of the original isolation. It abounds in monosyllables which are the foundations of the language. The transition into the agglutinative form marks an epoch that must have gradually extended through ages, the written literature of which has only survived in a few fragments of symbolical mythology and certain pithy sentences which have passed into popular proverbs. With the extant literature of the Vrelia the inflectional stratum commences. No doubt at that time there must have operated concurrent causes in the fusion of races by some dominant people and the rise of some great literary phenomena by which the form of language became arrested and fixed. As the inflectional stage prevailed over the agglutinative it is surprising to see how much more boldly the original roots of the language project from the surface that conceals them. In the old fragments and proverbs of the preceding stage the monosyllables which compose those roots vanish amidst words of enormous length, comprehending whole sentences from which no one part can be disentangled from the other and employed separately. But when the inflectional form of language became so far advanced as to have its scholars and grammarians they seemed to have united in extirpating all such polysynthetical or polysyllabic monsters as devouring invaders of the aboriginal forms. Words beyond three syllables became proscribed as barbarous and in proportion as the language grew thus simplified it increased in strength, in dignity, and in sweetness. So now very compressed in sound it gains in clearness by that compression. By a single letter according to its position they contrived to express all that would civilize nations in our upper world it takes the waste, sometimes of syllables, sometimes of sentences, to express. Let me here cite one or two instances. On which I will translate man, anah, men. The letter S is with them a letter implying multitude according to where it is placed. Sana means mankind, ansah, a multitude of men. The prefix of certain letters in their alphabet invariably denotes compound significations. For instance gl, which with them is a single letter as th is a single letter with the Greeks. At the commencement of a word infers an assemblage or union of things, sometimes kindred, sometimes dissimilar, as un, a house, gl un, a town, i.e. an assemblage of houses. Atah is sorrow, gl atah, a public calamity. Aur an is the health or well-being of a man, glaur an, the well-being of the state, the good of the community. And a word constantly in their mouths is aglaur an, which denotes their political creed, namely that the first principle of a community is the good of all. Aub is invention, sila, a tone in music, glaubsila, as uniting the ideas of invention and of musical intonation is the classical word for poetry, abbreviated in ordinary conversation to glaubs. Na, which with them is, like gl, but a single letter, always when an initial implies something antagonistic to life or joy or comfort, resembling in this the arian root knock, expressive of perishing or destruction. Nox is darkness, gnarl, death, narya, sin or evil, Nos an uttermost condition of sin and evil, corruption. In writing they deem it irreverent to express the supreme being by any special name. He is symbolized by what may be termed the hieroglyphic of a pyramid forward slash backslash. In prayer they address him by a name which they deem too sacred to confide to a stranger and I know it not. In conversation they generally use a periphrastic epithet such as the all good. The letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly always denotes excellence of power, as vryl, of which I have said so much, vid, an immortal spirit, vid ya, immortality, cum, pronounced like the Welsh cum, denotes something of hollowness. Cum itself is a cave, cum in, a holl, ze cum, a valley, cum ze, vacancy or void, budha cum, ignorance, literally knowledge void. Cum posh is their name for the government of the many or the ascendancy of the most ignorant or hollow. Cum posh is an almost untranslatable idiom, implying, as the reader will see later, contempt. The closest rendering I can give to it is our slang term posh, and this cum posh may be loosely rendered hollow posh. But when democracy or cum posh degenerates from popular ignorance into that popular passion or ferocity which precedes its disease, as, to cite illustrations from the upper world, during the French reign of terror, or for the fifty years of the Roman Republic preceding the ascendancy of Augustus, their name for that state of things is Glecnaus. Ic is strife, Glec the universal strife, nas, as I before said, is corruption or rot, thus Glecnaus may be construed the universal strife rot. Their compounds are very expressive, thus budha being knowledge, and too a participle that implies the action of cautiously approaching, too budha is their word for philosophy, pa is a contemptuous exclamation analogous to our idiom stuff and nonsense, pa budha, literally stuff and nonsense knowledge, is their term for futile and false philosophy and applied to a species of metaphysical or speculative radiation formerly in vogue which consisted in making inquiries that could not be answered and were not worth making, such for instance as, why does an on have five toes to his feet instead of four or six? Did the first on, created by the all good, have the same number of toes as his descendants? In the form by which an on will be recognized by his friends in the future state of being, will he retain any toes at all, and if so, will they be material toes or spiritual toes? I take these illustrations of pa budha not in irony or jest, but because the very increase I name formed the subject of controversy by the latest cultivators of that science, four thousand years ago. In the declension of nouns I was informed that anciently there were eight cases, one more than in the Sanskrit grammar, but the effect of time has been to reduce these cases and multiply instead of these varying terminations, explanatory propositions. At present in the grammar submitted to my study there were four cases to nouns, three having varying terminations, and the fourth a differing prefix. Plural nominative on man, dative ano man, accusative anan man, vocative hillan o man. Plural nominative ana men, dative anoi two men, accusative ananda men, vocative hillananda o men. In the elder inflectional literature the dual form existed, it has long been obsolete. The genitive case with them is also obsolete, the dative supplies its place. They say the house to a man instead of the house of a man. When used, sometimes in poetry, the genitive in the termination is the same as the nominative. So is the oblative, the preposition that marks it being a prefix or suffix at option and generally decided by ear according to the sound of the noun. It will be observed that the prefix hill marks the vocative case. It is always retained in addressing another except in the most intimate domestic relations. Its omission would be considered rude. Just as in our forms of speech, in addressing a king it would have been deemed disrespectful to say king and reverential to say o king. In fact, as they have no titles of honor, the vocative adoration supplies the place of a title and is given impartially to all. The prefix hill enters into the composition of words that imply distant communications as hillia to travel. In the conjugation of the verbs, which is much too lengthy a subject to enter on here, the auxiliary verb ya to go, which plays so considerable part in the Sanskrit, appears and performs a kindred office as if it were a radical in some language from which both had descended. But another auxiliary or opposite signification also accompanies it and shares its labors, namely ze to stay or repose. This ya enters into the future tense, and ze in the preterite of all verbs requiring auxiliaries, yam I shall go, yiam I may go, yani ya I shall go, literally I go to go, zam pu yaan I have gone, literally I rest from gone. Ya as a termination implies by analogy, progress, movement, efflorescence. Ze as a terminal denotes fixity, sometimes in a good sense, sometimes in a bad, according to the word with which it is coupled. Eva ze, eternal goodness, nun ze, eternal evil. Pu, from, enters as a prefix to words that denote repugnance, or things from which we ought to be averse. Pu pra, disgust, pu narya, falsehood, the vilest kind of evil. Pu sh, or posh, I have already confessed to be untranslatable, literally. It is an expression of contempt, not unmixed with pity. This radical seems to have originated from inherent sympathy between the labial effort and the sentiment that impelled it, Pu being an utterance in which the breath is exploded from the lips with more or less vehemence. On the other hand ze, when an initial, is with them a sound in which the breath is sucked inward, and thus ze, pronounced ze, which in their language is one letter, is the ordinary prefix to words that signify something that attracts, pleases, touches the heart, as ze mer, lover, ze ze, love, ze zeulia, delight. This indrawn sound of ze seems indeed naturally appropriate to fondness. Thus even in our language mothers say to their babies, in defiance of grammar, ze darling. And I have heard a learned professor at Boston call his wife, he had only been married a month, ze little pet. I cannot quit the subject, however, without observing by what slight changes in the dialects favored by different tribes of the same race, the original signification and beauty of sounds may become confused and deformed. Ze told me with much indignation that ze, lover, which in the way she uttered it, seemed slowly taken down to the very depths of her heart, was, in some not very distant communities of the Vrelia, vitiated into a half hissing, half nasal, wholly disagreeable sound of suburb. I thought to myself, it only wanted the introduction of n before you, to render it into an English word significant of the last quality an amorous gi would desire in her zoomer. I will but mention another peculiarity in this language which gives equal force and brevity to its forms of expressions. Ah is with them as with us, the first letter of the alphabet, and is often used as a prefix word by itself to convey a complex idea of sovereignty or chiefdom or presiding principle. For instance, eva is goodness, diva, goodness and happiness united, adiva is unerring and absolute truth. I have already noticed the value of ah in aglauran, so in Vrel to whose properties they trace their present state of civilization, Avril denotes, as I have said, civilization itself. The philologist will have seen from the above how much the language of the Vrelia is akin to the Arian or Indo-Germanic, but, like all languages, it contains words and forms in which transfers from very opposite sources of speech have been taken. The very title of Tur, which they give to their supreme magistrate, indicates theft from a tongue akin to the Turanian. They say themselves that this is a foreign word borrowed from a title which their historical record showed to have been borne by the chief of a nation with whom the ancestors of the Vrelia were in very remote periods, on friendly terms, but which has long become extinct. And they say that when after the discovery of Vrel they remodeled their political institutions, they expressly adopted a title taken from an extinct race and a dead language for that of their chief magistrate, in order to avoid all titles for that office with which they had previous associations. Should life be spared to me, I may collect into systematic form such knowledge as I acquired of this language during my sojourn amongst the Vrelia, but what I have already said will perhaps suffice to show to genuine philological students that a language which preserving so many of the roots in the aboriginal form and clearing from the immediate but transitory polysynthetical stage so many root encumbrances from popular ignorance into that popular passion or ferocity which precedes its disease as, to cite illustrations from the upper world, during the French reign of terror, or for the fifty years of the Roman Republic preceding the ascendancy of Augustus. Their name for that state of things is Glechnas, ek is strife, Glech the universal strife, Nas, as I before said, is corruption or rot. Thus Glechnas may be construed the universal strife rot. Their compounds are very expressive. That which the Anah have attained forbids the progressive cultivation of literature, especially in the two main divisions of fiction and history, I shall have occasion to show later. CHAPTER XIII This people have a religion and whatever may be said against it, at least it has these strange peculiarities, firstly that all believe in the creed they profess, secondly that they all practice the precepts which the creed inculcates, they unite in the worship of one divine creator and sustainer of the universe, they believe that it is one of the properties of the all permeating agency of Vril to transmit to the wellspring of life and intelligence every thought that a living creature can conceive. And though they do not contend that the idea of a deity is innate, yet they say that the An, man, is the only creature so far as their observation of nature extends to whom the capacity of conceiving that idea with all the trains of thought which open out from it is vouchsafed. They hold that this capacity is a privilege that cannot be given in vain and hence that prayer and thanksgiving are acceptable to the divine creator and necessary to the complete development of the human creature. They offer their devotions both in private and public. Not being considered one of their species, I was not admitted into the building or temple in which the public worship is rendered. But I am informed that the service is exceedingly short and unattended with any pomp of ceremony. It is a doctrine with the Vrelia that earnest devotion of complete abstraction from the actual world cannot with benefit to itself be maintained long at a stretch by the human mind especially in public and that all attempts to do so either lead to fanaticism or to hypocrisy. When they pray in private it is when they are alone or with their young children. They say that in ancient times there was a great number of books written upon speculations as to the nature of the deity and upon the forms of belief or worship supposed to be most agreeable to him. But these were found to lead to such heated and angry disputations as not only to shake the peace of the community and divide families before the most united, but in the course of discussing the attributes of the deity the existence of the deity himself became argued away or what was worse became invested with the passions and infirmities of the human disputants. For, said my host, since a finite being like an on cannot possibly define the infinite so when he endeavors to realize an idea of the divinity he only reduces the divinity into an on like himself. During the later ages, therefore, all theological speculations, though not forbidden, have been so discouraged as to have fallen utterly into disuse. The Virelia unite in a conviction of a future state, more felicitous and more perfect than the present. If they have very vague notions of the doctrine of rewards and punishments it is perhaps because they have no systems of rewards and punishments among themselves, for there are no crimes to punish, and their moral standard is so even that no on among them is, upon the whole, considered more virtuous than another. If one excels perhaps in one virtue another equally excels in some other virtue. If one has his prevalent fault or infirmity so also another has his. In fact, in their extraordinary mode of life there are so few temptations to wrong that they are good, according to their notions of goodness, merely because they live. They have some fanciful notions upon the continuance of life when one's bestowed even in the vegetable world as the reader will see in the next chapter. CHAPTER XIV Though, as I have said, the Virelia discourage all speculations on the nature of the Supreme Being, they appear to concur in a belief by which they think to solve that great problem of the existence of evil which has so perplexed the philosophy of the upper world. They hold that wherever he has once given life, with the perceptions of that life, however faint it be, as in a plant, the life is never destroyed. It passes into new and improved forms, though not in this planet, differing therein from the ordinary doctrine of metempsychosis, and that the living thing retains the sense of identity so that it connects its past life with its future and is conscious of its progressive improvement in the scale of joy. For they say that, without this assumption, they cannot, according to the lights of human reason vouchsafe to them, discover the perfect justice which must be a constituent quality of the all-wise and the all-good. In justice, they say, can only emanate from three causes, want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it, and that each of these three wants is incompatible in the all-wise, the all-good, the all-powerful, but that while even in this life the wisdom, the benevolence, and the power of the supreme being are sufficiently apparent to compel our recognition, the justice necessarily resulting from those attributes absolutely requires another life, not for man only, but for every living thing of the inferior orders, that alike in the animal and the vegetable world, we see one individual rendered, by circumstances beyond its control, exceedingly wretched compared to its neighbors. One only exists as the prey of another. Even a plant suffers from disease till it perishes prematurely while the plant next to it rejoices in its vitality and lives out its happy life free from a pang. But it is an erroneous analogy from human infirmities to reply by saying that the supreme being only acts by general laws, thereby making his own secondary causes so potent as to mar the essential kindness of the first cause, and a still meaner and more ignorant conception of the all-good, to dismiss with a brief contempt all consideration of justice for the myriad forms into which he has infused life, and assume that justice is only due to the single product of the on. There is no small and no great in the eyes of the divine life-giver, but once grant that nothing, however humble, which feels that it lives and suffers, can perish through the series of ages, that all its suffering here, if continuous from the moment of its birth to that of its transfer to another form of being, would be more brief compared with eternity than the cry of the newborn is compared to the whole life of a man. And once suppose that this living thing retains its sense of identity when so transformed, or without that sense it could be aware of no future being. And though, indeed, the fulfilment of divine justice is removed from the scope of our ken, yet we have a right to assume it to be uniform and universal, and not varying and partial, as it would be if acting only upon general and secondary laws. With such perfect justice flows of necessity from perfectness of knowledge to conceive, perfectness of love to will, and perfectness of power to complete it. However fantastic this belief of the Vriliya may be, it tends perhaps to confirm politically the systems of government which, admitting different degrees of wealth, yet establishes perfect equality in rank, exquisite mildness in all relations and intercourse, and tenderness to all created things which the good of the community does not require them to destroy. And though their notion of compensation to a tortured insect or a cankered flower may seem to some of us a very wild crotchet, yet at least is not a mischievous one. And it may furnish matter for no unpleasing reflection to think that within the abysses of earth, never lit by a ray from the material heavens, there should have penetrated so luminous a conviction of their ineffable goodness of the Creator, so fixed an idea that the general laws by which he acts cannot admit of any partial injustice or evil, and therefore cannot be comprehended without reference to their action over all space and throughout all time. And since, as I shall have occasion to observe later, the intellectual conditions and social systems of this subterranean race comprise and harmonize great and apparently antagonistic varieties in philosophical doctrine and speculation which have from time to time been started, discussed, dismissed, and have reappeared amongst thinkers or dreamers in the upper world. So I may perhaps appropriately conclude this reference to the belief of the Vriliya that self-conscious or sentient life once given is indestructible among inferior creatures as well as in man, by an eloquent passage from the work of that eminent zoologist Louis Agassiz, which I have only just met with many years after I had committed to paper these recollections of the life of the Vriliya which I now reduce into something like arrangement and form. Quote, the relations which individual animals bear to one another are of such character that they ought long ago to have been considered as sufficient proof that no organized being could ever have been called into existence by other agency than by the direct intervention of a reflective mind. This argues strongly in favor of the existence in every animal of an immaterial principle similar to that which by its excellence and superior endowments places man so much above the animals, yet the principle unquestionably exists and whether it be called sense, reason, or instinct, it presents in the whole range of organized beings a series of phenomena closely linked together and upon it are based not only the higher manifestations of the mind but the very permanence of the specific differences which characterize every organism. Most of the arguments in favor of the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings. May I not add that a future life in which man would be deprived of that great source of enjoyment and intellectual and moral improvement which results from the contemplation of the harmonies of an organic world which involve a lamentable loss? And may we not look to a spiritual concert of the combined worlds and all their inhabitants in the presence of their Creator as the highest conception of paradise? End quote from the essay on classification Section 17 pages 97 to 99. End of Chapter 14 Section 9 of The Coming Race This is a LibriVox recording. No LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Rodie. The Coming Race by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. Chapter 15 Kind to me as I found all in this household, the young daughter of my host was the most considerate and thoughtful in her kindness. At her suggestion I laid aside the habiliments in which I had descended from the upper earth and adopted the dress of the Vrelia with the exception of the artful wings which served them when on foot as a graceful mantle. But as many of the Vrelia when occupied in urban pursuits did not wear these wings, this exception created no market difference between myself and the race among whom I sojourned, and I was thus able to visit the town without exciting unpleasant curiosity. Out of the household no one suspected that I had come from the upper world, and I was but regarded as one of some inferior and barbarous tribe whom Apollin entertained as a guest. The city was large in proportion to the territory round it, which was of no greater extent than many an English or Hungarian nobleman's estate. But the whole of it, to the verge of the rocks which constituted its boundary, was cultivated to the nicest degree except where certain allotments of mountains and pasture were humanely left free to the sustenance of the harmless animals they had tamed, though not for domestic use. So great is their kindness towards these humbler creatures, that a sum is devoted from the public treasury for the purpose of deporting them to other Vrelia communities willing to receive them, chiefly new colonies, whenever they become too numerous for the pastures allotted to them in their native place. They do not, however, multiply to an extent comparable to the ratio at which with us animals bred for slaughter increase. It seems a law of nature that animals not useful to man gradually recede from the domains he occupies or even become extinct. It is an old custom of the various sovereign states amidst which the race of the Vrelia are distributed to leave between each state a neutral and uncultivated borderland. In the instance of the community I speak of, this tract being a ridge of savage rocks was impassable by foot, but was easily surmounted whether by wings of the inhabitants or the airboats of which I shall speak hereafter. Roads through it were also cut for the transit of vehicles impelled by Vrelia. These intercommunicating tracts were always kept lighted and the expense thereof defrayed by a special tax to which all the communities comprehended in the denomination of Vrelia contribute in settled proportions. By these means a considerable commercial traffic with other states both near and distant was carried on. The surplus wealth on this special community was chiefly agricultural. The community was also eminent for skill in constructing implements connected with the arts of husbandry. In exchange for such merchandise it obtained articles more of luxury than necessity. There were a few things imported on which they set a higher price than birds taught to pipe artful tunes in concert. These were brought from a great distance and were marvelous for beauty of song and plumage. I understand that extraordinary care was taken by their breeders and teachers in selection and that the species had wonderfully improved during the last few years. I saw no other pet animals among this community except some very amusing and sportive creatures of the batration species resembling frogs but with very intelligent countenances which the children were fond of and kept in their private gardens. They appeared to have no animals akin to our dogs or horses though that learned naturalist zee informed me that such creatures had once existed in those parts and might now be found in regions inhabited by other races than the Vrilya. She said that they had gradually disappeared from the more civilized world since the discovery of Vril and the results attending that discovery had dispensed with their uses. History and the invention of wings had superseded the horse as a beast of burden and the dog was no longer wanted either for protection or the chase as it had been when the ancestors of the Vrilya feared the aggressions of their own kind or hunted the lesser animals for food. Indeed, however, so far as the horse was concerned, this region was so rocky that a horse could have been there of little use either for pastime or burden. The only creature they use for the latter purpose is a kind of large goat which is much employed on farms. The nature of the surrounding soil in these districts may be said to have first suggested the invention of wings and airboats. The largeness of space in proportion to the space occupied by the city was occasioned by the custom of surrounding every house with a separate garden. The broad main street in which Apalindwelt expanded into a vast square in which were placed the College of Sages and all the public offices. A magnificent fountain of the luminous fluid which I call NAFTA, I'm ignorant of its real nature, in the center. All these public edifices have a uniform character of massiveness and solidity. They reminded me of the architectural pictures of Martin. Along the upper stories of each ran a balcony, or rather a terraced garden, supported by columns filled with flowering plants and tenanted by many kinds of tame birds. From the square branched several streets, all broad and brilliantly lighted, and ascending up the eminence on either side. In my excursions in the town I was never allowed to go alone, Apalind or his daughter was my habitual companion. In this community the adult gi is seen walking with any young on as familiarly as if there were no difference of sex. The retail shops are not very numerous. The persons who attend on a customer are all children of various ages, and exceedingly intelligent and courteous, but without the least touch of importunity or cringing. The shopkeeper himself might or might not be visible. When visible he seemed rarely employed on any matter connected with his professional business, and yet he had taken to that business from special liking for it, and quite independently of his general sources of fortune. The ana of the community are, on the whole, an indolent set of beings after the active age of childhood. Whether by temperament or philosophy, they rank repose among the chief blessings of life. Indeed, when you take away from a human being the incentives to action which are found in cupidity or ambition, it seems to me no wonder that he rests quiet. In their ordinary movements they prefer the use of their feet to that of their wings. But for their sports, or to indulge in a bold misuse of terms, their public promenades, they employ the latter, also for the aerial dances I have described, as well as for visiting their country places, which are mostly placed on lofty heights. And when still young they prefer their wings for travel into the other regions of the ana to vehicular conveyances. Those who accustom themselves to flight can fly, if less rapidly than some birds, yet from twenty-five to thirty miles an hour, and keep up that rage for five or six hours at a stretch. But the ana, generally, on reaching middle age, are not fond of rapid movements requiring violent exercise. Perhaps for this reason, as they hold a doctrine which our own physicians will doubtless approve, namely that regular transpiration through the pores of the skin is essential to health, they habitually use the sweating baths, to which we give the name Turkish or Roman, succeeded by douches of perfumed waters. They have great faith in the salubrious virtue of certain perfumes. It is their custom also, at stated but rare periods, perhaps four times a year when in health, to use a bath charged with brille. Note, I once tried the effect of the brille bath. It was very similar in its invigorating powers to that of the baths at Gastein, the virtues of which are described by many physicians to electricity, but though similar, the effect of the brille bath was more lasting. And note. They consider that this fluid, sparingly used, is a great sustainer of life, but used in excess when in the normal state of health, rather tends to reaction and exhausted vitality. For nearly all their diseases, however, they resort to it as the chief assistant to nature in throwing off their complaint. In their own way, they are the most luxurious of people, but all their luxuries are innocent. They may be set to dwell in an atmosphere of music and fragrance. Every room has its mechanical contrivances for melodious sounds, usually tuned down to soft murmured notes, which seem like sweet whispers from invisible spirits. They are too accustomed to these gentle sounds to find them a hindrance to conversation, nor when alone to reflection. But they have a notion that to breathe an air filled with continuous melody and perfume has necessarily an effect at one's soothing and elevating upon the formation of character and the habits of thought. Though so temperate, and with total abstinence from other animal food than milk, and from all intoxicating drinks, they are delicate and dainty to an extreme in food and beverage. And in all their sports even the old exhibit a childlike gaiety. Happiness is the end at which they aim, not as the excitement of a moment, but as the prevailing condition of the entire existence, and regard for the happiness of each other is evinced by the exquisite amenity of their manners. Their conformation of skull has market differences from that of any known races in the upper world, though I cannot help thinking it a development in the course of countless ages of the Brachycephalic type of the Age of Stone in Lyell's Elements of Geology, CHAPTER X, PAGE 113, as compared with the Dalicocephalic type of the beginning of the Age of Iron, correspondent with that now so prevalent amongst us, and called the Celtic type. It has the same comparative massedness of forehead, not receding like the Celtic, the same even brownness in the frontal organs. But it is far loftier in the apex, and far less pronounced in the hindercranial hemisphere where phrenologists place the animal organs. To speak as a phrenologist, the cranium common to the Vrelia has the organs of weight, number, tune, form, order, causality, very largely developed. That of construction much more pronounced than that of ideality. Those which are called the moral organs, such as conscientiousness and benevolence, are amazingly full. Amativeness and combattiveness are both small, adhesiveness large. The organ of destructiveness, i.e. of determined clearance of intervening obstacles, immense, but less than that of benevolence. And their pheloprogenitiveness takes rather the character of compassion and tenderness to things that need aid or protection than of the animal love of offspring. I never met with one person deformed or misshapen. The beauty of their countenances is not only in symmetry of feature, but in a smoothness of surface which continues without line or wrinkle to the extreme of old age, and a serene sweetness of expression combined with that majesty which seems to come from consciousness of power and the freedom of all terror, physical or moral. It is that very sweetness combined with that majesty which inspired, in a beholder like myself, accustomed to strive with the passions of mankind, a sentiment of humiliation, of awe, of dread. It is such an expression as a painter might give to a demigod, a genius, an angel. The males of the Vriliya are entirely beardless. The Jayae sometimes, in old age, develop a small moustache. I was surprised to find that the color of their skin was not uniformly that which I had remarked in those individuals whom I had first encountered, some being much fairer and even with blue eyes and hair of a deep golden auburn, though still of complexions warmer or richer in tone than persons in the north of Europe. I was told that this admixture of coloring arose from the intermarriage with other and more distant tribes of the Vriliya who, whether by the accident of climate or early distinction of race, were of fairer hues than the tribes of which this community formed one. It was considered that the dark red skin showed the most ancient family of Anna, but they attached no sentiment of pride to that antiquity and, on the contrary, believed their present excellence of breed came from frequent crossing with other families differing yet akin, and they encouraged such intermarriages, always provided that it be with the Vriliya nations. Nations which, not conforming their manners and institutions to those of the Vriliya, more indeed held capable of acquiring the powers over the Vril agencies which had taken them generations to attain and transmit, were regarded with more disdain than the citizens of New York regard the Negroes. I learned from Zee who had more lore in all matters than any male with whom I was brought into familiar converse, that the superiority of the Vriliya was supposed to have originated in the intensity of their earlier struggles against obstacles in nature amidst the localities in which they had first settled. Whoever, said Zee, moralizing, wherever goes on that early process in the history of civilization by which life is made a struggle, in which the individual has to put forth all his powers to compete with his fellow, we invariably find this result, namely, since in the competition a vast number must perish, nature selects for preservation only the strongest specimens. With our race, therefore, even before the discovery of Vril, only the highest organizations were preserved, and there is among our ancient books a legend, once popularly believed, that we were driven from a region that seems to denote the world you come from in order to perfect our condition and attain to the purest elimination of our species by the severity of the struggles our forefathers underwent, and that, when our education shall become finally completed, we are destined to return to the upper world and supplant all the inferior races now existing therein. Apolin and Zee often conversed with me in private upon the political and social conditions of that upper world in which Zee so philosophically assumed that the inhabitants were to be exterminated one day or other by the advent of the Vrelia. They found in my accounts, in which I continued to do all I could, without launching into falsehood so positive that they would have been easily detected by the shrewdness of my listeners, to present our powers and ourselves in the most flattering point of view, perpetual subjects of comparison between our most civilized populations and the meaner subterranean races which they considered hopelessly plunged in barbarism and doomed to gradual if certain extinction. But they both agreed in desiring to conceal from their community all premature opening into the regions lighted by the sun. Both were humane and shrunk from the thought of annihilating so many millions of creatures, and the pictures I drew of our life, highly colored as they were, saddened them. In vain I boasted of our great men, poets, philosophers, or raiders, generals, and defied the Vrelia to produce their equals. Alas, said Zee, this predominance of the few over the many is the surest and most fatal sign of a race incorrigibly savage. See you not that the primary condition of mortal happiness consists in the extinction of that strife and competition between individuals, which, no matter what forms of government they adopt, render the many subordinate to the few, destroy real liberty to the individual, whatever may be the nominal liberty of the state, and annul that calm of existence, not which felicity, mental or bodily, cannot be attained. Our notion is that the more we can assimilate life to the existence which our noblest ideas conceive to be that of spirits on the other side of the grave, why the more we approximate to a divine happiness here, and the more easily we glide into the conditions of being hereafter, for surely all we can imagine of the life of God's, or of blessed immortals, supposes the absence of self-made cares and contentious passions, such as avarice and ambition. It seems to us that it must be a life of serene tranquility, not indeed without active occupations to the intellectual or spiritual powers, but occupations of whatsoever nature they be congenial to the idiosyncrasies of each not forced and repugnant, a life gladdened by the untrammeled interchange of gentle affections in which the moral atmosphere utterly kills hate and vengeance and strife and rivalry. Such is the political state to which all the tribes and families of the Vrelia seek to attain, and towards that goal all our theories of government are shaped. You see how utterly opposed is such a progress to that of the uncivilized nations from which you come, and which aim at a systematic perpetuity of troubles and cares, and warring passions aggravated more and more as their progress storms its way onward. The most powerful of all the races in our world, beyond the pale of the Vrelia, esteems itself the best governed of all political societies, and to have reached in that respect the extreme end at which political wisdom can arrive, so that the other nations should tend more or less to copy it. It has established, on its broadest base, the kumpush, namely the government of the ignorant upon the principles of being the most numerous. It has placed the supreme bliss in the vying with each other in all things, so that the evil passions are never in repose, vying for power, for wealth, for eminence of some kind, and in this rivalry it is horrible to hear the vituperation, the slanders and calamities which even the best and mildest among them heap on each other without remorse or shame. Some years ago, said Apollon, I visited this people, and their misery and degradation were the most appalling because they were always boasting of their felicity and grandeur as compared with the rest of their species. And there is no hope that this people which evidently resembles your own, can improve because all their notions tend to further deterioration. They desire to enlarge their dominion more and more in direct antagonism to the truth that, beyond a very limited range, it is impossible to secure to a community the happiness which belongs to a well-ordered family. And the more they mature a system by which a few individuals are heated and swollen to a size above the standard slenderness of the millions, the more they chuckle and exact and cry out, see by what great exceptions to the common littleness of our race we prove the magnificent results of our system. In fact, resumed Z, if the wisdom of human life be to approximate to the serene equality of immortals, there can be no more direct flying off into the opposite direction than a system which aims at carrying to the utmost the inequalities and turbulences of mortals. Nor do I see how, by any forms of religious belief, mortals so acting could fit themselves even to appreciate the joys of immortals to which they still expect to be transferred by mere act of dying. On the contrary, minds accustomed to place happiness in things so much the reverse of Godlike would find the happiness of God's exceedingly dull and would long to get back to a world in which they could quarrel with each other. CHAPTER 16 I have spoken so much of the real staff that my reader may expect me to describe it. This I cannot do accurately, for I was never allowed to handle it for fear of some terrible accident occasioned by my ignorance of its use. And I have no doubt that it requires much skill and practice in the exercise of its various powers. It is hollow, and has in the handle several stops, keys, or springs by which its force can be altered, modified, or directed, so that by one process it destroys, by another it heals, by one it can rend the rock, by another disperse the vapor, by one it affects bodies, by another it can exercise a certain influence over minds. It is usually carried in the convenient size of a walking staff, but it has slides by which it can be lengthened or shortened, at will. When used for special purposes, the upper part rests in the hollow of the palm with the fore and middle fingers protruded. I was assured, however, that its power was not equal in all, but proportion to the amount of certain drill properties in the wearer, in affinity or rapport with the purposes to be affected. Some were more potent to destroy, others to heal, etc. Much also depended on the calm and steadiness of volition in the manipulator. They assert that the full exercise of drill power can only be acquired by the constitutional temperament, i.e. by hereditary transmitted organization, and that a female infant of four years old belonging to the Vriliya races can accomplish feats which a life spent in its practice would not enable the strongest and most skilled mecanition born out of the pale of the Vriliya to achieve. All these wands are not equally complicated. Those interested to children are much simpler than those born by sages of either sex, and constructed with a view to the special object on which the children are employed, which, as I have before said, is, among the youngest children, the most destructive. In the wands of wives and mothers, the correlative destroying force is usually abstracted, the healing power fully charged. I wish I could say more in detail of this singular conductor of the Vril Fluid, but its machinery is as exquisite as its effects are marvelous. I should say, however, that this people have invented certain tubes by which the Vril Fluid can be conducted towards the object it is meant to destroy throughout a distance almost indefinite. At least I put it modestly when I say from five hundred to a thousand miles. And their mathematical science, as applied to such purpose, is so nicely accurate that on the report of some observer in an airboat, any member of the Vril Department can estimate unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles, the height to which the projectile instrument should be raised, and the extent to which it should be charged, so as to reduce to ashes within a space of time too short for me to venture to specify it, a capital twice as vast as London. Certainly these ana are wonderful mathematicians, wonderful for the adaptation of the inventive faculty to practical uses. I went with my host and his daughter Zee over the great public museum, which occupies a wing in the College of Sages, and in which are hoarded, as curious specimens of the ignorant and blundering experiments of ancient times, many contrivances on which we pride ourselves as recent achievements. In one department, carelessly thrown aside as obsolete lumber, are tubes for destroying life by metallic balls and an inflammable powder on the principle of our cannons and catapults, and even still more murderous than our latest improvements. My host spoke of these with a smile of contempt, such as an artillery officer might bestow on the bows and arrows of the Chinese. In another department there were models of vehicles and vessels worked by steam and of an air balloon which might have been constructed by Montgolfier. Such, said Zee, with an air of meditative wisdom, such were the feeble triflings with nature of our savage forefathers, ere they had even a glimmering perception of the properties of rill. This young ghee was a magnificent specimen of the muscular force to which the females of her country attain. Her features were beautiful, like those of all her race. Never in the upper world have I seen a face so grand and so faultless, but her devotion to the severer studies had given to her countenance an expression of abstract thought which rendered it somewhat stern when in repose, and such a sternness became formidable when observed in connection with her ample shoulders and lofty stature. She was tall even for a ghee, and I saw her lift up a cannon as easily as I could lift a pocket-pistol. Zee inspired me with a profound terror, a terror which increased when we came into a department of the museum appropriated to models of contrivances worked by the agency of rill. For here, merely by a certain play of her rill staff, she herself standing at a distance, she put into movement large and weighty substances. She seemed to endow them with intelligence, and to make them comprehend and obey her command. She set complicated pieces of machinery into movement, arrest it the movement, or continued it, until, within an incredibly short time, various kinds of raw material were reproduced as symmetrical works of art, complete and perfect. Whatever effect mesmerism or electrobiology produces over the nerves and muscles of animated objects, this young ghee produced by the motions of her slender rod over the springs and wheels of lifeless mechanism. When I mentioned to my companions my astonishment at this influence over inanimate matter, while owning that, in our world, I had witnessed phenomena which showed that over certain living organizations, certain other living organizations could establish an influence genuine in itself, but often exaggerated by credulity or craft. Zee, who was more interested in such subjects than her father, bade me stretch forth my hand and then, placing it beside her own, she called my attention to certain distinctions of type and character. In the first place, the thumb of the ghee, and, as I afterwards noticed, of all that race, male or female, was much larger, at once longer and more massive than is found with our species above ground. There is almost, in this, as greater difference as there is between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla. Secondly, the palm is proportionally thicker than ours, the texture of the skin infinitely finer and softer, its average warmth is greater. More remarkable than all this is a visible nerve perceptible under the skin which starts from the wrist skirting the ball of the thumb and branching fork-like at the roots of the fore and middle fingers. With your slight formation of thumb, set the philosophical young ghee, and with the absence of the nerve which you find more or less developed in the hands of our race, you can never achieve other than imperfect and feeble power over the agency of rill. But so far as the nerve is concerned, that is not found in the hands of our earliest progenitors nor in those of the rudor tribes without the pale of the rillia. It has been slowly developed in the course of generations, commencing in the early achievements and increasing with the continuous exercise of the rill power. Therefore, in the course of one or two thousand years, such a nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher beings of your race who devote themselves to that paramount science through which is attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated by rill. But when you talk of matter as something in itself inert and motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so ignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert. Every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by agencies of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but rill the most subtle and, when skillfully wielded, the most powerful. So that, in fact, the current launched by my hand and guided by my will does but render quicker and more potent the action which is eternally at work upon every particle of matter, however inert and stubborn it may seem. If a heap of metal be not capable of originating a thought of its own, yet, through its internal susceptibility to movement, it obtains the power to receive the thought of the intellectual agent at work on it, by which, when conveyed with the sufficient force of the rill power, it is as much compelled to obey as if it were displaced by a visible bodily force. It is animated for the time being by the soul thus infused into it, so that one may almost say that it lives and reasons. Without this we could not make our automata supply the place of servants. I was too much in awe of the Thu's and the learning of the young Gee to hazard the risk of arguing with her. I had read somewhere in my schoolboy days that a wise man disputing with the Roman emperor suddenly drew in his horns, and when the emperor asked him whether he had nothing further to say on his side of the question, replied, nay, Caesar, there is no arguing against a reasoner who commands ten legions. Though I had a secret persuasion that whatever the real effects of rill upon matter, Mr. Faraday could have proved her a very shallow philosopher as to its extent or its causes, I had no doubt that Z could have brained all the fellows of the royal society, one after the other, with a blow of her fist. Every sensible man knows that it is useless to argue with any ordinary female upon matters he comprehends, but to argue with a Gee seven feet high upon the mysteries of rill, as well argue in a desert and with a Simoon. Despite the various departments to which the vast building of the College of Sages was appropriated, that which interested me most was devoted to the archaeology of the rillia, and comprised a very ancient collection of portraits. In these the pigments and groundwork employed were of so durable a nature that even pictures set to be executed at dates as remote as those in the earliest annals of the Chinese retained much freshness of color. In examining this collection two things especially struck me. First, that the pictures set to be between six thousand and seven thousand years old were of a much higher degree of art than any produced within the last three thousand to four thousand years. And second, that the portraits within the former period much more resembled our own upper world and European types of countenance. Some of them indeed reminded me of the Italian heads which look out from the canvases of Titian, speaking of ambition of craft, of care or of grief, with furrows in which the passions have passed with iron plowshare. These were the countenances of men who had lived in struggle and conflict before the discovery of the latent forces of rill had changed the character of society, men who had fought with each other for power or fame as we in the upper world fight. The type of face began to evince a market change about a thousand years after the rill revolution, becoming then with each generation more serene and in that serenity more terribly distinct from the faces of laboring and sinful men. While in proportion, as the beauty and the grandeur of the countenance itself became more fully developed, the art of the painter became more tame and monotonous. But the greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three portraits belonging to the prehistorical age, and according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Buddha or a Greek Prometheus. From this mysterious personage, at once a sage and a hero, all the principal sections of the Vriliya race pretend to trace a common origin. The portraits are of the philosopher himself, of his grandfather and great-grandfather. They are all at full length. The philosopher is attired in a long tunic, which seems to form a loose suit of scaly armor borrowed perhaps from some fish or reptile, but the feet and hands are exposed. The digits in both are wonderfully long and webbed. He has little or no perceptible throat and a low receding forehead, not at all the ideal of a sages. He has bright brown prominent eyes, a very wide mouth and high cheekbones, and a muddy complexion. According to tradition, this philosopher had lived to a patriarchal age extending over many centuries, and he remembered distinctly in middle life his grandfather as surviving and in childhood his great-grandfather. The portrait of the first he had taken, or caused to be taken, while yet alive, that of the latter was taken from his effigies in mummy. The portrait of his grandfather had the features and aspect of the philosopher only much more exaggerated. He was not dressed, and the color of his body was singular, the breast and stomach yellow, the shoulders and legs of a dull bronze hue. The great-grandfather was a magnificent specimen of the Batracian genus, a giant frog, for example. Among the pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, this is notably recorded. Quote, humble yourselves, my descendants, the father of your race was a twat, tadpole. Exalted yourselves, my descendants, for it was the same divine thought which created your father that develops itself in exalting you. End quote. Apalyn told me this fable while I gazed on the three Batracian portraits. I said in reply, you make a gist of my supposed ignorance and credulity as an uneducated tish, but though these horrible dobs may be of great antiquity and were intended, perhaps, for some rude caricature, I presume that none of your race, even in the less enlightened ages, ever believed that the great-grandson of a frog became a sententious philosopher, or that any section, I will not say of the lofty Riliah, but of the meanest varieties of the human race, had its origin in a tadpole. Pardon me, answered Apalyn. In what we call the wrangling or philosophical period of history, which was at its height about seven thousand years ago, there was a very distinguished naturalist who proved to the satisfaction of numerous disciples such analogical and anatomical agreements and structure between an on and a frog, as to show that out of the one must have developed the other. They had some diseases in common, they were both subject to the same parasitical worms in the intestines, and, strange to say, the on has, in his structure, a swimming bladder, no longer of any use to him, but which is a rudiment that clearly proves his descent from a frog. Nor is there any argument against this theory to be found in the relative difference of size, for there are still existent in our world frogs of a size and stature not inferior to our own, and many thousand years ago they appear to have been still larger. I understand that, said I, because frogs this enormous are according to our eminent geologists, who perhaps saw them in dreams, set to have been distinguished inhabitants of the upper world before the deluge, and such frogs are exactly the creatures likely to have flourished in the lakes and morasses of your subterranean regions, but pray proceed. In the wrangling period of history, whatever one sage asserted, another sage was sure to contradict. In fact, it was a maxim in that age that the human reason could only be sustained aloft by being tossed to and fro in the perpetual motion of contradiction, and therefore another sect of philosophers maintained the doctrine that an on was not the descendant of the frog, but that the frog was clearly the improved development of the on. The shape of the frog, taken generally, was much more symmetrical than that of the on. Beside the beautiful conformation of its lower limbs, its flanks, and shoulders, the majority of the anah in that day were almost deformed, and certainly ill-shaped. Again, the frog had the power to live alike on land and in water, a mighty privilege, partaking of a spiritual essence denied to the on, since the disuse of his swimming-bladder clearly proves his degeneration from a higher development of species. Again, the earlier races of the anah seem to have been covered with hair, and even to a comparatively recent date, his suit bushes deformed the very faces of our ancestors, spreading wild over their cheeks and chins, as similar bushes, my poor tish, spread wild over yours. But the object of the higher races of the anah through countless generations has been to erase all vestige of connection with hairy vertebrata, and they have gradually eliminated that debasing capillary excrement by the law of sexual selection, the jaillet naturally preferring youth or the beauty of smooth faces. But the degree of the frog in the scale of the vertebrata is shown in this, that he has no hair at all, not even on his head. He was born to that hairless perfection, which the most beautiful of the anah, despite the culture of incalculable ages, have not yet attained. The wonderful complication and delicacy of a frog's nervous system and arterial circulation were shown by this school to be more susceptible of enjoyment than our inferior, or at least simpler, physical frame allows us to be. The examination of a frog's hand, if I may use that expression, accounted for its keener susceptibility to love and to social life in general. In fact, gregarious and amatory as are the anah, frogs are still more so. In short, these two schools raged against each other, one asserting the anah to be the perfected type of the frog, the other that the frog was the highest development of the anah. The moralists were divided in opinion with the naturalists, but the bulk of them sided with the frog-preference school. They said, with much plausibility, that in moral conduct, namely in the adherence to rules best adapted to the health and welfare of the individual and the community, there could be no doubt of the vast superiority of the frog. All history showed the wholesale immorality of the human race, the complete disregard, even by the most renowned amongst them, of the laws which they acknowledged to be essential to their own and the general happiness and well-being. But the severest critic of the frog race could not detect in their manners a single aberration from the moral law tacitly recognized by themselves. And what, after all, can be the profit of civilization if superiority in moral conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by which its progress should be judged? In fact, we find, the adherence of this theory presumed, that in some remote period the frog race had been the improved development of the human, but that, from some causes which defied rational conjecture, they had not maintained their original position in the scale of nature. While the anah, though of inferior organization, had by dint less of their virtues than their vices, such as ferocity and cunning, gradually acquired ascendancy, much as among the human race itself tribes utterly barbarous have, by superiority in similar vices, utterly destroyed or reduced into insignificance, tribes originally excelling them in mental gifts and culture. Unhappily these disputes became involved with the religious notions of that age, and as society was then administered under the government of the Kumpush, who, being the most ignorant, were, of course, the most inflammable class, the multitude took the whole question out of the hands of the philosophers. Political chiefs saw that the frog dispute, so taken up by the populace, could become a most valuable instrument of their ambition, and for not less than one thousand years war and massacre prevailed, during which period the philosophers on both sides were butchered, and the government of Kumpush itself was happily brought to an end by the ascendancy of a family that clearly established its descent from the aboriginal tadpole, and furnished despotic rulers to the various nations of the Anah. These despots finally disappeared, at least from our communities, as the discovery of Vril led to the tranquil institutions under which flourish all the races of the Vrilya. And do no wranglers or philosophers now exist to revive the dispute, or do they all recognize the origin of your race in the tadpole? Nay, such disputes, said Zee, with the lofty smile, belong to the Pabudhav, the dark ages, and now only serve for the amusement of infants. When we know the elements out of which our bodies are composed, elements in common to the humblest vegetable plants, then it signify whether the all-wise combined those elements out of one form more than another, in order to create that in which he has placed the capacity to receive the idea of himself, and all the varied granders of intellect to which that idea gives birth. The on in reality commenced to exist as an on with the donation of that capacity, and, with that capacity, the sense to acknowledge that, however through the countless ages his race may improve in wisdom, it can never combine the elements at its command into the form of a tadpole. You speak well, Zee, said Apalin, and it is enough for us short-lived mortals to feel a reasonable assurance that whether the origin of the on was a tadpole or not, he is no more likely to become a tadpole again, than the institutions of the Vrelia are likely to relapse into the heaving quagmire and certain strife wrought of a kumpush.