 CHAPTER XVII. In the medical, chemical, and elementary families these senses were trained to a pitch that seemed to me marvellous. By either smell or taste a member of these families could tell the constituent elements of any compound. A medical sage, if a man, could distinguish by the faint odor that marked each human body, whether it was losing energy or expending it, making progress or decaying, if a woman, the sage, in order to make this decision, had as a rule to bring in the help of taste. For it had remained from the primitive animal stage of man's development one of the differentiating marks of sex that the male had more energy of smell, the female more energy of taste. Now that they had so spiritualized their senses, perfumes formed the quickest stimulus of the masculine imagination and flavors of the feminine. At the food vats it was always limonore and women who super-intended the flavoring of any compound. Wilt it was the men who had most to do with medicating the atmospheres of the chambers, and men presided in the chemical laboratories. The historical origin of this distinction, they thought, was on the one hand the development of the acuteness of smell in male animals at rutting-time, and on the other the power in dams of recognizing their own offspring by licking it with the tongue. And it was a well-known maxim in their medical families that every individual had a distinctive odor and taste. They could tell one man from another in the dark, and even at a considerable distance, and to touch him with the tongue was to make assurance doubly sure. The kissing that was so common in the West as a symbol of friendship and love, like the rubbing of noses amongst less civilized peoples, had as its origin and basis the recognition of the individual by the taste or smell. They did not need so close or material in an investigation of the individual to have pleasant memories of friendship aroused. Their methods and symbols of companionship and love had become more and more spiritual with the passionate self. But, preternaturally acute through their senses seemed to me to be, they would rely upon their decisions no more than the modern scientist of the West would rely upon his. Error, they held, was ever maiming the conclusions from reports of the senses, and they took every precaution in recording or using their own perceptions. Accurate, though their sense memory was, they had instruments which kept a permanent record of any report of the senses they meant to use again. Not merely sounds and sights did they automatically record, but perfumes and flavors and electric impressions. Ages before, the Innocent or Recorder of Light and the Linocent or Recorder of Sound had been brought to a high pitch of perfection. All the colors and forms seen in nature, at whatever distance, could be kept in permanence on irrelium plates and reproduced to the eye by the insertion of the plates in the Innocent and the reversal of the instrument. So it was with sounds, however loud or faint, the Linocent would tell out to the ear music or speeches recorded hundreds of years before down to the minutest tone. By a modification of these two instruments they took record of the inner structure of things even at cosmic distances, and of sounds which seemed to be intercepted by vast material obstructions. The development of the recorders of the other senses had been more recent. Not till perfumes and taste and electricity had begun to enter largely into education and the stimulants of memory did the necessity for such instruments arise. In the earlier times before the purgation of the race these instruments would have been a temptation to new and epicurian vices. Now they were nothing if not educational aids. The pharaohsan, or aromagraph, enabled the gardeners to arrange the mnemonic harmonies of flowers as mere sense-memory could never have done. It could reproduce any subtle perfume or mixture of perfumes that had ever been experienced in the island. The salosan, or gustograph, gave incalculable aid to the chemical and elementary families. Without its permanencies of flavor they would have fallen into daily errors in mingling the atmospheres of the halls of sustenance and medication and those of illarhyme. By its aid they could recall any of the tastes which had made substances or compounds pleasing to the palate. But it was the idrosan, or electrograph, that was most needed. For the furla, or electric sense, had been so recently developed that its reports as to the amount and quality of any electric impulse were most untrustworthy. Without the aid of this recorder they could never have compared the electric impulses of the past with those of the present. Or could they have been so accurate in measuring the electric powers of various substances? They knew that the basis of all scientific advance was accurate measurement. Their old measuring instruments had gradually been overtaken by their own senses and had to be replaced by others more and more refined. In order to make sure that their senses introduced no personal element into the reports and representations of their various delicate measures they had invented an instrument which for fine adjustments surpassed all of these. It was the aerolan, or sensorometer, and by it the medical families in their weekly review of every system in the community were unable to find the exact personal equation of each. It recorded the upper and lower limit of the various sensations, the limit of endurance, and the vanishing point. Although there was a great evenness in the development of the senses in the community there was yet considerable variation in the delicacy of perception. One man was keenest in sight, another in hearing, a third in the electric sense, yet there was a certain constancy or proportion in all the senses of every man, a proportion varying according to well-acertained laws within the hour and the season, the man's age, and the temperature and health of his body. The aerolan tested, measured, and recorded the regular variations of each limonoren senses, and thus he was able to know how far he judged accurately anything he perceived. By its aid he was able to know the exact point at which he would need to call in any one of the various mechanical aids to the senses, the magnifiers or modifiers, or distance reducers. By this means they were able to gauge the proper mixture of colors and proper size in architecture that would please at certain distances. By its means too, they could accurately measure the distance from which any electric or luminous or some niferous impulse had come when it struck on the senses. It was one of the common places of their policy that whatever could be done by machinery it was waste of skill and energy to do by human labor and thought, and instruments were generally more exact and reliable than the senses and active powers of man, however delicately developed and refined. Of course man's brain and hand must still guide and superintend all instruments and machinery, but his interference with their automatic working was reduced to a minimum, in order that the discount for personal equation should be as little as possible. It was not, however, so much for the sake of accuracy of the result that the mechanism was substituted for human work, as for the sake of progress. Every operation and function which could be performed mechanically, it was a slur upon human dignity to do, and at once limonore and humanity was relieved from the necessity, and the freed energy was applied to other and nobler efforts towards progress. During my education I had noticed again and again with surprise that mathematics took no part in it. Not once had I heard the subject mentioned by any of my guides or companions. I remembered the important place at hell in western curriculums, and wondered how the various scientific families could manage their obstruce formulae and calculations without that science. A people that laid so much stress on the exactitude of research as an essential of all scientific progress, were surely lacks to a degree in failing to train their youth in the various branches of mathematics. On having my senses tested by the airline, the thought came uppermost in my mind again, and my pro-parents at last took notice of it, perhaps as the time had arrived for enlightening me on the subject. They led me to a vast museum-like building, crammed with all kinds of small and intricate machines, not unlike a kind of patent office, where the models of new inventions are deposited for examination and comparison. There was evident in the arrangement a careful classification according to elaboration and delicacy. In the first section we entered there were the simplest of machines, having a few levers and cog-wheels, and a few keys set in a keyboard. These were meant for the easier rules of calculation, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We tested most of them, and I saw that they were infallibly accurate. Never once, even in the longest and most intricate calculation, was there any error. In fact, these machines had been first invented to avoid the constant errors that vitiated important results when novices were set to work them out. It was then found that not only did they rid calculations of fallibility and the youth of heartless drudgery, but they enabled the race to advance more rapidly. They set free years of life, especially in the formative stage, that had been wasted on mere routine and mechanical work, and, best of all, they allowed the tissues of young brains to be less rigid. It was noted that, after the calculating machines were set to work, the youth grew in mental and especially in imaginative power at twice the old rate. The elders of the state were amazed at the result, prizing as they had done the effect of arithmetic in the discipline and education of the young. Indeed, it had been with great regret that they saw the youth relieved of so disciplinary an exercise, and they even thought of making an exception to their usual utilitarian state principle, and training the boys and girls in rapid calculation, although it would be of so little use to them in their afterlives. But a few years convinced them of the serious mistake they had made. The pace of development so suddenly and greatly quickened in the new generation that the result could be set down to nothing else than the new freedom from calculations. Their own faculties and imaginations seemed stiff and almost ossified compared to the ease and flexibility of those of their sons and daughters. Invention and discovery struck out with an unprecedented energy, and the ethical and emotional phase of imagination grew at a marvelous pace. New ideal realms were opened out for morality and practical thought. The experience threw a remarkable light upon the phenomenon which had puzzled them for generations. After the period of youth the members of the community had to specialize, and for some undiscoverable reason, those who devoted themselves to mathematics and the working of obtruse, formulae, had been found. Able though most of them were, to be the most rigidly unreasonable in the community, they refused to admit that they could be mistaken in any of their judgments or even opinions. Nothing would move them, neither logical argument nor emotional appeal. They assumed that they had found absolute truth, and refused to have compromise. In one generation in the far past the mathematical families had to be exiled, so serious an obstruction had they become to progress. Again they had to be completely renewed, children of the most noble minded, freest, and most imaginative families being substituted for the old members, and trained to fulfill their functions. Within a generation the result was the same. These scions of the finest of the race became as narrow-minded and obstructive as their predecessors had been. It seemed to be useless to change the stock, and for some generations the community accepted their conservatism and obstancy as inevitable. They grew accustomed to smiling at the mathematical families as the omniessence. Why the true cause of this degeneracy had not occurred to such a shrewd and logical people, it is hard to say. Probably because they were so wedded by long tradition and practiced to the idea that mathematics was one of the loftiest of sciences, and one of the most essential elements in education. They doubtless refused to reconsider its claims or to abandon their inherited reference for it. But the discovery of the effect of the calculative habit on the tissues of the brain at last forced them to face the true cause of the infallibility of these mathematical families. It was their occupation that caused their degeneracy. Men began to pity them for the slavery in which they had been so long held, and to devise means for their liberating. The old habitual smile at the mention of their name became sadness at the thought of what these members of the race might have accomplished for its civilization had they not been so frozen in their tissues by the perpetual use of formulae. They were amazed at their own dullness in failing to see that men who dealt in such mechanical methods and exact results could not but be mechanical themselves and easily fall into the fixed mental attitude of the omniessent, and dealing with the world so unreal in its stiff, skeleton-like outlines could not but fail in a world of conditions and compromises. At first, the prevailing idea was that all the studies and sciences needed exactitude of formulae and results should be neglected by the community. One consideration it was felt that some of the most valuable stepping-stones to the loftier ideals of the future would be sacrificed if this were done. The other alternative was chosen. The inventors who had made the calculating machines were set on to find instruments which would accomplish what the mathematicians had had to do for the community. And, one after the other, the years had produced them. Even differential and integral calculus had been superseded by a series of machines that with little guidance worked out all the applications of their intricate formulae to the sciences. As we advanced from department to department, we watched these machines at work confirming the imaginative results of the physicists, the chemists, and the astronomers. The mathematical families were relieved of their duties and distributed, and every member of the scientific families was taught to use these formulating instruments. Their brain energy was not monopolized by calculations. The use of the machines was but a routine detail in their wider intellectual life, and absorbed so little of their energy that it seemed to have no effect on their faculties. I was not many days in mastering the details of the formulae machines, for I had paid some attention to mathematics in my buried life and the memory of the subject rapidly revived. I soon came to see the wisdom of the Lymanorans in eliminating the study from their scheme of education. It would have been the height of extravagance to waste long periods of their lives in studying and doing what a machine could do better. It was exactly the kind of work best done by a machine, for it had to do with the world rid of all conditions, and, mathematically speaking, perfect. The inventors were still busy making new and simpler machines for the use of the scientists, and, though they had to know the new mathematical formulae needed, they busied their brains rather with their practical application, and with the machinery that would use them. It was imagination in the practice of mechanics, rather than the mechanical use of methods and formulae that they were engaged on. Hence it was that they avoided the old unpracticality of the mathematical families, and stood in no danger of thinking themselves infallible and the only treasuries of absolute truth. One of the most interesting departments of Minella, as this great building was called, was that which contained the measures of time. I was somewhat surprised that this department should exist, for I had admired every day the power the Lymanorns had of telling to a minute fraction the passage of time. Their sense of time seemed to me to make watches and clocks superfluous. Even when the sky was clouded over and no heavenly body or light to be perceived, they could tell the exact fraction of the day or night that had passed, as I tested again and again by the watch I had brought with me. Their knowledge of the natural signs of the time of day or year had become instinctive and automatic through long centuries of daily use. The position and state of the petals of flowers would at any moment by day or night, by shine or cloud, reveal to them the time. So would the temperature of anything they touched, or, if it were highly contractile, its size. But these external signs were quite unnecessary. They had not to go beyond the sensations of their own bodies to tell the time or season. They knew by the intensity of the magnetism in them, by the acuteness of their senses, by the amount of energy they could command. But their experiments needed far more exactness than even their senses could afford. Time had to be counted in their science not by mere seconds, but by the hundred-thousandths or even the millionth part of a second. One old fashion measure of time was based on the length of a wave of sound as it passed through a vessel of water. The length of the vessel contained a round number of multas, their smallest measure of length, perhaps about the millionth part of an inch. The vibration of the water reflected a bright light through a microscope and camera combined, and a photograph of the pulsations imprinted itself on a strip of irrelinium that kept moving with lightning swiftness across the focus. This strip was divided into minute sections, each of them corresponding to a lenta or millionth part of a second and numbered in order up to a million. A newer clock had its principle based on the length of a wave of light in a vacuum. Another and more convenient clock, or rather watch, consisted of an electric battery that kept a light irrelinium tongue vibrating. This ladder controlled a graduated mechanism which pointed out on a face the exact lenta in the time of day that it was. It was small enough to be carried about on the person like a watch. A similar microscopic minuteness of division appeared in all their weights and measures. They could weigh in their balances down to the million-millionth part of an ounce. So with their measurement of heat and cold, their thermometers could test ten thousand times the range of temperature that their senses could bear. Although their power of endurance of fire and frost was to me something miraculous. Their furnaces were able to volatize the most refractory of metals and earths. They could reproduce the conditions of the most glowing suns, and also the temperature of the oldest interstellar space, which, age by age, they were bringing their frames gradually to bear with the aid of certain foods and combinations of elements. Thus did they hope, in some future age, to subsist, even when they ventured outside of the atmosphere of the earth. All their measures were based on the decimal system, the fundamental unit for microscopic measurements being the amount of energy in an atom of one of their elements, and that, for the cosmic measurements, the energy that would bring a beam of light from the sun's surface to the earth's. They were able to see at a glance the exact amount of energy in any phenomenon, to whatever sense it might appeal, and in their minds there was ever a common measure for all types of force. Their electrometers and magnimeters told not merely the amount of electricity or magnetism in any machine, material or phenomenon, but the motive power it would have when applied to any purpose. They could compare at a glance, without any elaborate calculations, the advantages to be obtained from any substance when using it as a force, whether through the electricity or the heat or the gravitational power to be obtained from it. Especially useful was this common measure in dealing with the power of light as separate from that of heat. It was of great importance to them to know the exact amount of energy, even in a beam of light, which their eyes could not perceive. For they used sunshine as one of their great curative agencies, and the medical families were constantly experimenting on the effect of more or less light upon the microscopic life existing in and around the human body. One of their all new developments had been the consciousness of light all over their skin. They could tell with their eyes shut whether it was light of sun, stars, or moon, or an artificial light which was falling on any part of their body. The effect, even on the mind, differed completely in the fore. The sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave exhilaration or even joy. The starshine brought contemplative melancholy. The moon-beam mildly stirred the passions, while artificial light varied in its power of exhausting brain and nerve energy with the material or element that produced it. Sunlight deprived of the intensity of its heat was to them one of the essentials of life. Its bactericidal power had been scientifically proved ages before, and a family had been set apart for testing its effects both qualitatively and quantitatively. It was not merely a loose knowledge that they had acquired of the antiseptic influence of sunshine. They had measured exactly its power of depriving microbes of their deadliness in the case of every disease, and they knew to anisody how strong or weak it would be needed in order to check their ravages in any constitution, whether concentrated on a spot or diluted and spread as in a bath, how long daily its application would be required, and how many days. It was this family that superintendent the sun baths in the halls of medication, and assisted the medical sages in advising as to their use. It was true that daylight, and especially that of a sunny day, swept one-third of the noxious life out of all water open to its influence, whilst the rays of the sun bleached most bacteria from their pestiferous tendency. Yet used indiscriminately, sunshine became itself unwholesome, because of the other forms of energy besides light that it brought with it from the sun and the intervening spaces. If not used with caution, it would destroy the microscopic allies of human life in the body, rendering feeble the phagocytes that devour the virulent microbes. It would, by its great heat, injure the delicate tissues of the brain, and by its magnetism and weight press heavily on the nerves and the circulation. It was the duty of the solometric family to renovate its unwholesome elements, and to indicate the exact amount and use of it that would be beneficial in every state of the body. Another of the duties of this family was to cultivate colonies of microbes of the various diseases, and make them harmless by means of sunlight for use in inoculations against their own unmodified bacterial kin. One of their greatest aids in this process was the use of water of the sea. Whenever it did not kill the bacteria completely, it emphasized the bleaching power of sunlight over them, and rendered them allies of the human system in its struggle against all disease and decay. This sterilization of disease was one of the most important functions of the family. It was they who led the fight gambles of the limon-orans into the outer fringe of the atmosphere, where they might drink in the elixir of unadulterated sunshine. Their guidance and contrivances were needed even there, in order to prevent the action of the other energies in the light growing deleterious. Even moonlight and starshine had their uses in the hands of this skilled family. They could separate the deadly or poisonous elements of moonbeams to help them in destroying bacterial life, and leave only their healthy and inspiring tendencies. Thus dealt with, the rays of the moon gave a stimulus to the brain tissues, which worked up imaginative materials. And every star had, in their science, its own peculiar influence. Sometimes malign, more commonly beneficial, when treated according to their wise discoveries. Little of all this would have been possible without the inolan, or measure of light, one of the most delicate instruments they possessed. This was but a modification of the human eye as it had been developed in their bodies. It magnified the impression made on the lens so that it would move a small mirror delicately hung in vacuole. The reflection of this mirror ran along a graduated scale on which it recorded by bleaching a point of color, the energy of light in the beam producing the movement. This recorded not merely the strength of the rays of which their eyes were conscious, but that of many octaves of light outside the range of all human eyes. A more modern and delicate form of the inolan used a microscope camera as the medium of measurement. This had accomplished new wonders in the way of measuring the power of rays from stars out of reach of the human eye. A third photometer, recently invented still untested when I visited the collection of measureers, had made use of electricity in collecting and testing the quality and energy of beams of light. In all of these forms of the inolan there was an arrangement for reading each ray of its heat and other forms of energy before it entered the lens. A thermometer measured the heat, and the other elements were absorbed and analyzed by a subsidiary apparatus as the beam approached the inolan. Another modification of the apparatus had a prismatic arrangement attached to it, not unlike the NMR, and this broke up the beam of light into its color components. The inolan measured each separate component, the length of its wave, and the energy required to produce it. Its camera also recorded in photographic form the metallic elements through which the beam had passed. A more recent modification, promising great results, was one which by means of a vacuum lens recorded the dark beams that shone from unseen stellar bodies through the corona of our own or other suns. When fully developed they expected this to reveal the secrets of the darker depths of the heavens. The systems revolving round the stars would stand out clearly with all their elements for the investigation of the astronomical families. Nor did the extraordinary refinement of these instruments, that were constantly being discovered, interfere in any way with the development of limonor and senses. On the contrary, they stimulated advance. Every new aid to any sense pointed the way to its improvement, and in a few years or generations this aid was rendered almost superfluous and a new and more delicate machine must be invented. For the combination of so many functions in the living body rendered the observations of any one sense less exact and trustworthy than those of a machine which had but one purpose. Thus the evolution of the senses kept up an unending race with the evolution of fine machinery to aid them. Even the roughest, most material, and least specialized of all the senses, touch had grown into something that was most delicate in its manipulation, and one of the most important parts of the education of my senses was to refine and develop it. They had specialized it to an astonishing degree. The lips, especially the outer edges of them, were able to distinguish the latent energy in any substance applied to them, whilst a delicate fringe of hair upon the upper lip, too minute to be seen by ordinary eyes, revealed to them the movements and character of gases and vapors that were so faint in their impulse as to be unrecognizable by the other senses. The measurement of force had been raised to a high point of exactness in their huge chests and shoulders. Their hands, within certain limits, felt temperature with the accuracy and minuteness of a thermometer, and the prehensile and manipulative skill of their fingers far surpassed that of the ablest European conjurer I had ever seen. Without any intention to outwit my senses, they would do things with their hands so swiftly that I could not follow the movements. It seemed to me at first, as if they had more joints in their fingers than other human beings, so nimble were they, but this was not the case. Although the arm had greater scope of movement than mine, in fact it seemed to move in the shoulder socket as any universal joint, so freely could it revolve in all directions. Their joints were really more padded with cartilage than mine, so that there was more flexibility in the limbs along with greater firmness and strength. Their nerves were also more magnetic than those of other men, conveying the messages to and from the brain and wheel centers with far more swiftness and certitude. Indeed, if I were to find any one point in their systems which most differentiated them from European humanity, it was this increased and accelerated nerve energy. For a long time their rapidity and ease of movement and action bewildered me, whilst I was deliberating what was to be done, they had done all that was needed. They had instruments for measuring the flash of thought from brain to hand and of sensation from hand to brain, and when tested at first, the swiftness of the message along my nerves was not one tithe of theirs, but when my education had somewhat advanced, this disparity was reduced by half. This advance was accomplished not merely by practice, but by variety of diet and medication, and by living in a more magnetic atmosphere. I was often borne aloft into the pure air that fringes the envelope of our earth, and there, half asleep, I drew into my system the electric elements which were to the quickening of my nerves. Down in the island everything that would excite me was avoided. The muscles and the other tissues of the body were exercised, whilst the nerves completely rested. Then they would be given gentle exercise of their own, to strengthen and make them supple, without unduly stimulating them. I soon began to feel the difference in the increasingly nimbleness of my limbs and could move with more celerity and ease. The fingers were quicker to follow the eye. I grew what my old companions would have thought unerring in my aim, and would have made a deadly shot with bullet or arrow in the wars of my native country. What was still better, the tips of my fingers came to be powerfully magnetic both in their appreciation of the electricity in any body they touched, and inactively producing magnetic currents. I was even able to cause a faint flash in the darkness by concentrating my willpower in my fingers and waving them in the air. POST-SCRIPT When he had reached this point in his narrative, a striking instance of the result of his education occurred. It was getting towards the end of winter, and we had our rules of thumb for the changes in the weather were looking for the equinoxial gales that harbinger the approach of spring. The days were lengthening and the light of the sun was growing clear and strong upon our high-perched huts. We had noticed a certain distraction in his manner, an absence of thought or of consciousness, when he was describing the development of his magnetic sense. And when he ceased for the night he could not rest but paced uneasily along our platform of cliff which overlooked the waters of the sound. The moon had begun to wane, and our weather lore bet us look out for storms at the beginning of her next phase. I could not go myself to rest for thinking of his strange narrative and the wonderful people he had sojourned amongst. I sat up many hours writing out what I could remember of his conversations and descriptions while it was still clear in my mind. Some time after midnight I looked out and saw the silver moonshine on the still waters below and was attracted by the beauty of the scene. I had thought that he had retired, but I had scarcely seated myself on a projecting boss of rock that took in one of our widest views, when his musical voice startled me out of my reverie. He fell into such sympathetic intercourse as the beauty of the night often stimulates into sleepless spirits meeting under the moon. He told me that the earth was then tremulous with suppressed passion, and that far off in his old home in the Pacific her heart was about to break. He felt waves of magnetic feeling pass through him, and they drew his soul back to Lymanora. He knew that the spirits he loved there were yearning for him. His heart quivered and throbbed with full memories of all he had known and experienced. There was anguish in the magnetic undulance vibrating across his being. It was not merely that a great storm was approaching, that he had known for some days. There were human pulsations in the ether which beat like an ocean upon his brain. That was why he could not rest. If only he could have his wings again, he would try to respond to the call. But it was useless with the recruitisance of his muddier humanity to attempt any return by such aerial means. I offered to go with him on the morrow to the nearest city and charter a ship to carry us to his former home. But he would not listen to my proposal, and bade me seek rest and sleep. I began to feel that I was intruding on the privacy of an agonized soul, and I bade him good night and left him to his own thoughts. The exhaustion of overcharged emotion soon let me drift into troubled unconsciousness. Dream followed dream like hurrying clouds over the moon. At dawn I woke in nightmare. The hut was shaking. I thought I was still dreaming. But the swish of the rain and the lashing of the tree branches on the roof soon made me understand. The calm of the night before had given way to tempest, and the earth was suffering rupture. I remembered the prediction of our guest, and rushed to his hut. He was not there, nor could I conjecture whether he had gone. I thought he had taken shelter in the bush from the storm. Three days it lasted, and then we were able to go out and search the drenched forest. We followed up every track that he had been accustomed to take. We went to all his favorite haunts. But no trace could we find of him, though days were spent on the search. Then we forced our way through the dense undergrowth in several directions we had never seen him take, and at last we came across a yawning chasm which had every appearance of being newly opened. The precipitous side of the mountain had split, and a vast landslip had swept down it and filled the bottom of the gulf. We could not resist the natural conclusion. This was the tomb of our guest. After all his wanderings he had found appropriate resting place. The earthy noose of well had taken him to her bosom. End of Chapter 17, Part 2 End of Lymenora, Book 1 Book 2 of Lymenora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Preface Late in the autumn, when the memory of the stranger who had told us so many wonderful things had begun to lose its sharpness and we had almost ceased to talk of him, we were startled by his reappearance. We were in our tunnels, taking advantage of the dry weather to get piles of our washed dirt out ready for sluicing in the wet season, and we were working till nightfall. On a still, fair evening, which reminded me of the night he vanished, we were returning jaded from our long work and had just issued from the belt of bush that fringed our clearing when the moon rose above the peaks on the other side of the fjord and flashed a shuttle of gold across the waters. Raising our eyes till our huts, we stopped thunderstruck. Was that but a lunar effect on the throne-like cliff in front of them? It could not be a spirit. We had never heard of ghosts in these new lands, nor could the belief in them seize hold of minds so accustomed as ours were to deal with the rougher and more material elements of nature. We shook off our trance and stepped forward. The sound of our footsteps made the figure move, and as he turned in the moonlight we recognized our lost friend, his apparition we first supposed. But he rose with his old quiet and dignified salute of welcome, and joining us as we sat at our evening meal, we talked as if he had parted with us only that morning. We had not the hardy-hood to ask him what had become of him these long months. But I noticed that he had more of his old semi-transparency of tissue and ethereality of hue, and in his eyes, as he ceased talking, there was a baffled look I had never seen before in them. He would lapse more frequently into deep reverie. He seemed to have gone through a lifetime of effort and suffering, and his spirit was, I could see, weary and sore within him. He shrank at first from all reference to his life within the circle of mist out on the Pacific. It seemed now to be a painful memory. There was a pathos in his tone as he spoke far keener than I had noted in it before. But gradually I drew him in to reminiscence of it when we were alone in the bush, and he seemed after a time to find consolation in thinking and speaking about it, especially when he talked of the spiritual side of the civilization in the midst of which he had lived for so many years. In the long nights of that last winter he resumed his narrative again. He seemed to have difficulty in finding English expression for what he had to tell, but I encouraged him in our wanderings around the fjord to repeat and interpret and explain what he had told us. Gradually the narrative found a more intelligible language, and I was able to jot down notes that I understood. I have done my best to throw them together into the form that they ultimately found in his story as he told it to us sitting together in our hut. But I am still puzzled and sometimes confused by many of the ideas and feel that they have baffled my best skill to put them into our tongue. Some of his descriptions awakened in us a sense of incredulity, and others shook our old world of beliefs to its foundations. But we were drawn to him by the noble and ingenious way in which he told us all. Indeed, we're often fascinated and blinded as we listened. We could not but accept his story as the highest truth we could hear in this world, and yet we were struck dumb by its strangeness. Much of our bewilderment we attributed to the difficulty of understanding his strange speech, and more to our own ignorance of the intricate problems that have troubled sages. We have kept back this latter part of his story for a time in order that by study and care we might make it more intelligible and more suited to the thoughts of Christendom. But we have to acknowledge ourselves still baffled by the impossible task of making this robe through difficult regions plain and easy, and so have resolved to issue the narrative with all its faults upon it. Godfrey Swevin. End of Preface. Chapter 1 Part 1 of Lymanora. The Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Discoveries. Part 1. What I rejoiced over most of all was the growth of my sympathetic magnetism. Not merely was my fair law or electric sense developing more satisfactorily, but I was becoming rapidly conscious of the impulses of the race. I no longer walked amongst this refined people like a blind man amongst men who see. I began to feel the enthousiasms that stirred them as a body, like a wind across a cornfield. I seemed to know whatsoever of public concern was occurring without having it directly communicated to me. I remembered in the buried life of my boyhood and youth, the lightning spread of a new impulse through an assembly or a crowd. The most rational members of the mass were unable to resist it, even though it might be irrational or vile. How like a tornado the war impulse burst through a nation is one of the commonest observations in the study of history. Statesmen and kings and heroes have to bow before it, and are swept along with it in spite of their better judgments. And as swift and widespread as is the coward impulse that sends a defeated people cowering to their homes. It is this unspoken magnetism, giving van as it too often does to the evil in the human heart, that makes the cause of progress in even civilized races so hopeless. Through its all-leavening power success inspires and often consecrates the diabolic, and failure damns the noblest and most divine. And this it was that made progress so easy amongst the Lymanorans, it became the instrument of the highest elements and thoughts in them. The whole weight of their humanity was on the side of advance, and it was to the better future that they were ever gravitated. Everything that made for a higher plane was an inspiration to this people. This personal magnetism had been developed in them into a definite faculty of their souls. They had recognized for many ages the close affinity of mass inspiration and the power of the individual will. It was the same energy working along nerves, and even, though with some dissipation, through the space intervening between individualities. They had investigated its nature, conditions, and methods of action in their exact scientific way, and had identified it, as far at least as its form of energy was concerned, with electricity. It was even less dependent on material contact than that universal force. As they developed it in their frames, they were able to send more and more definite impulses through considerable distances. This was their phylamoo, or will-telegraph, one of their most remarkable faculties, drawn with deliberate purpose by the elders of the race out of the chaos of mere vague influence and tendency. Though making use of the active electric sense as channel, it was not the same as the phirla, for it implied a greater effort and outwelling of the whole spirit. Only exceptional impulses and enthusiasm set it into full efficiency, which impulses as entangled the whole soul in their issue. It was no mere toy to be used for amusement of the passing moment, dormant at lay, if ever summoned to such a purpose. It was the faculty that in other races and periods of history had set up men as heroes and leaders. Not that these had even been conscious of its existence in them when they began their career. Success and gathering enthusiasm in their followers it gave strength and issue, till their mere glance seemed to command. But when failure came, and the glamour or magnetic atmosphere rarefied about them, their faculty vanished, for it had no means of communicating its meaning or power. In certain periods of exaltation every Lymanoran was conscious of the phylamoo, or will-telegraph. He could not only receive but send emotional impulses through long distances. The intervening air was magnetized by their great enthusiasm or sympathy and became a medium for transmitting emotional or imaginative thought from mind to mind. Not yet had they been able to send a definite piece of information by this means, unless it represented the spiritual crisis through which the center was passing. But in movements that shook the whole race to its core, like Chakchru's threat of invasion, even those who were still in pupil age seemed to feel the beginnings of the faculty, at least on its receptive side. Secluded though they were far from the scene of deliberation, they knew the magnitude of the danger that threatened the life of the common wheel. The air seemed to tingle with it, and their ambronic phylamoo could not help responding to the vibration. Once awakened they were eager to bring out its latent power, that they might feel and know the impulses which sped the race onwards as a whole. They soon discovered that it ceased to grow or even work except under certain conditions. They must keep step with the people, and fix their eyes steadily on the future. They must never swerve from uprightness or candor, and never let the perfect transparency of their lives be clouded. Such had been the conditions of the development of the phylamoo in the race. In fact its indications had become unmistakable as soon as candor and truth had become the primary virtues, and progress the watchword. And it grew as the ideal of the nation became clearer and more imperative, and their character more uniformly strong and noble. They also found that something depended on the physical conditions. The atmosphere must be free from all impurity, and the body must be supremely healthy, whilst the magnetism of the wheel must have free course along the nerves. As my nature clarified under their training and my spirit grew more at one with the purpose of the race, I grew more sure of the stirrings of the phylamoo within me. At first its indications might be explained by other and more patent causes. I had been in an attitude of expectancy, or my reason had been following up certain trains of thought from previous events. But after a time there came to me thrills of emotion that were out of the range of my immediate surroundings and thoughts. I followed them out and found that they originated far from the locality in which I was working at the time. Once a sudden terror passed through my system as of some great fear, I had not been thinking of anything but the work before me. No cloud had come over my sky, no danger that I knew of threatened. And as I was trying to explain the emotion, it suddenly passed into longing to see Thairiel. I knew where she had gone that day and my work had almost reached a finish, so I adjusted a Felina, and flew quickly over the country in her direction. I soon knew why I had come. She was pinioned by a huge rock that had just tumbled from Lila Roma. Happily only her wings had been caught, but they had been caught in such a way that she was wedged tightly between them and could not free her arms and legs nor move her hands, and the boulder was too large for her to heave up by the strength of her body, even when magnetized by her will. When she saw this she withdrew the magnetism from the effort, and turned it in its full power into her phylumu as she thought of me. I was not long in disentangling her wings from their prison, but, before I was done, her family were beside us. They too had experienced the thrill, though more feebly than I had at a greater distance. Another time I had not seen Thairiel for some days. We were both busy at our own pursuits in different parts of the island. She, as I learned afterwards, had been set to account for a new and somewhat peculiar odor that had recently begun to accompany the issue of vapor from a distant lava well. I was engaged in timing a new and intermittent disturbance on the surface of the sea off the eastern shore, and trying to find whether it had any relationship to an intermittent fumarole which had recently broken out on the eastern slope of Lilaroma. I had kept watch for several days and could find no synchronism in their periods, although I was convinced that there was a close connection between them, if there was not a common cause. I was feeling baffled and somewhat downcast, when suddenly there sprang up in me a sense of elation, if not of triumph, which continued for the rest of the day, although I still failed to discover the connection between the two phenomena. When I set out the next day for the scene of my observations, I was joined by Thairiel, who explained that she had finished her task the day before and had now been detailed to assist me in mine. I then knew the cause of my thrill of joy, and told her of it. She had at that very hour not only discovered the source of the fumes in a new mineral that the Leo Moran had touched, but found this new deposit was extraordinarily generative of electricity. It was this that had made her heart leap for joy and go out towards me. She had longed for my sympathy in a rejoicing, and unconsciously her phylamo had energized in my direction. Between us we soon saw that there was a complicated periodicity in the alternations of my two phenomena. It needed several days' observation to catch the rhythm, and for that reason I had been baffled at first. Before long I discovered the cause, as soon as a lava well farther north had ceased to flow, they also ceased. It was the viscous intermittence of extreme opening and then closing two apertures below tide line into the subterraneous fires that had regulated the rhythm of these new vents. The break in the lava current, the rise and fall of the tide, and the rush of the breakers had made it complex. And the lava had finally closed both before it had ceased to flow. It was at the same period that the whole race breasted back the darkness. There came at times in their history an age of exceptional advance, that made the preceding era seem almost stationary. Nor had they yet been able to explain its appearance satisfactorily. It was easy enough to say that such and such exceptional men lived then, and that they produced the phenomenon. But that was only reasoning in a circle. They were as much a product of the time as their fellows. Whence did they get the inspiration which spurred them on, or the plastic material in which they could work? They would have been nothing without their conditions and circumstances. They surprised themselves with their powers and successes, as they strode forth into the primeval darkness and illuminated it. It all appeared very simple when once accomplished. They had been gazing for generations into the darkness, where now there was a blaze of light. An imaginative pioneering book had long ago suggested that the impulse came from outside the round of the earth. And one of the most brilliant discoveries of this newest period of advance was a scientific roof of this hypothesis. The great development of the Phylamu or Will Telegraph had made it easy, by localizing the new thrill of expectation, and revealing that it came from no terrain source. Out of what seemed the profound in name such inspirations issued, and if they found a soil prepared for them by long self-denial and patient outlook and industrious collection of materials, they fertilized the period into exceptional efflorescence and fruition. Many an impulse comes out of the blue and falls unveiling in that no nation or race or period is fit to receive it. The profound in name, they came to see, was one of the falsest of ideas, because no patent to the human sight fills it. The interstellar space was believed to be the wilderness of the universe, cold, bleak, inhospitable, lifeless. Now it was felt to be the home of all super-sensuous life, crowded with an energy that needed no stellar matter or atmosphere to support it, that never appealed to any but the highest and latest developed senses of man. The Lymanoran couriers, out on the verge of the Earth's atmosphere, had been the first to feel this new flash that lit up such a vast region of the infinite darkness. They came back inspired with new resolution that made the first of the discoveries. They gave a magnetism to their fellow workers in the same line, and soon the leaven spread through the whole people. The fervor of originality became the order of the day, to decipher the unknown hand-writings on the wall of life, to solve its hardest problems, to make new inventions and discoveries, to push out into the darkness that surrounds the world, these became the ambitions of all. Nor did the philamu of any in the island fail to thrill to the influence. Thyrielle felt before I did that there was something exceptional in the atmosphere. But even my will telegraph seemed to respond. I longed to go out and conquer the unknown, to outpace the slow movements of human discovery. At first I thought the impulse had come from Thyrielle, and then from my pro-parents or my teachers. And so it was with every Lymanoran. His first thought ran to his closest friend as the source of the magnetic thrill. But after much consultation and report, the conclusion appeared that no one in the island had originated the impulse. That all in the air had felt it simultaneously in their philamus, and after them all down in the island had felt it simultaneously. The truth gradually forced itself home on the investigating families that the magnetic vibration had had its source far beyond the limits of the earth, for they knew that from no other country or race upon the surface of the globe could it have come. Ages before, they had abandoned the belief in what seemed supra-terrene influence as unscientific and leading to superstition. Faith had been in the past so often the cue and basis of the worst of tyrannies. The inspiration of the grossest immoralities and irrationalities, the impulse to most regression. It had also, it is true, been the nurse of gentle and just spirits. But it made them so timid that they were afraid to go forward. It wound round the soul such a network of fears and observances that its life was useless to the race. As soon as the final purgation of the people had been accomplished, it was found that every citizen ceased to speak of faith, or to use it as the basis of any work or practical step. They did not trust it out of any public act, nor consciously reject it. They only left off giving weight to any of its commands or suggestions. Not that they might not be true or on the side of all that was best, but that it had so often discredited its authority by prompting, or allowing itself to be used as the pretext for retrogression or baseness. They preferred to take every step in life on ground made sure by investigation and proof that appealed to reason. And here they were again on the limits of the unknown and vague. This sense that was closest to the portal of the soul, their phylumu, had brought them to face an intelligence that came they knew not once, and to stand in the presence of an infinite darkness that flashed out at times the lightning of noble impulse. They were by no means unwilling to listen to its report, but gladly received it as a sure and trustworthy revelation. However dim the region into which it was about to lead them, they were eager to follow, if only they set each step upon solid fact. If there was anything unverifiable in this new leading, they would soon be done with it. It now became one of the duties of the astrobiological families to watch for these extra-terrene vibrations of the will-telegraph, and to investigate the circumstances and conditions. These families had been the first to feel the new impetus to discovery, for they were the couriers who went out to the borders of the atmosphere and watched four signs of energy and life in the infinite beyond. Again and again they had brought back the specimens of microscopic and attenuated life, which seemed to float in interstellar space. Again and again they had analyzed the beams of light shooting through it, but without much result. Now they were to be rewarded for their patience. They had taken out with them one of the new felinas made of transparent and colorless irrelium-like glass, and as an experiment they sent it up by means of electricity far above themselves. As it rose above the limit of the Earth's atmosphere they saw all over its surface a strange fluorescence, which grew unearthly in its beauty and brilliance. Rainbow colors played through its texture as if they were threads thrown by the shuttle of some hand out of heaven. Its wings moved at lightning pace, and yet soon it began to fall towards the Earth. Again it struck upwards, and again the prismatic weavings gave it more brilliant life. They watched it as it rose and fell between the denser and the rarer medium. And when finally they caught it and brought it down to Earth, upon its wings both within and without there was imprinted, not the iridescent web that had been weaving over it, but a hieroglyph of faint half-distinguishable forms, some familiar, some strange, inextricably mingled. They investigated the phenomenon, and came to the conclusion that the felina, in the comparative vacuum which lies on the borders of our atmosphere, had acted with its electric motors like the lavalan, one of their medical instruments for the inspection of the inner tissues, whilst the wings acted like the films of a photographic apparatus, and retained a shadow impress of the inner structure of all the beans or forms coming between them and the body of the car. A new world was opened up to them beyond even their electric sense. Outside the denser envelope of our orb the rarefaction of space meant no longer lifeless desolation traversed only by beams of light, electric impulses from other worlds, and the flight of occasional meteors. Now they knew that there were ethereal beings living in the infinite space, and that their inner structure differed in density from their enveloping material. Some of this life was manifestly minute and attenuated, unsuited to the medium in which it floated, waiting for some fit orb to land on. But under their powerful klyrolins it was clear that there were highly developed organisms fitted to this element in which they swam. Organisms probably higher than any to be found on the earth, yet too ethereal and shadowy to touch any of even the latest evolved senses of the Lymanorans. What possibilities this glimpse into the vast unknown opened up for them they shrank for a time from, imagining, lest they should again enslave themselves to superstition and absurd fancy. For astrobiology they saw at a glance there was begun a new and lofty career. Soon would they modify and improve the love of fan to fit the conditions of interstellar space, and the Felina, if not their own organs, for venturing far into the rarest ether. And then what reports? What pictures of the invisible universe would they bring before the eyes and the fearless of their fellow islanders? How would they ever have time to investigate and classify the genera and species that inhabited the ether? What limit was there to the ambitions and ideals they would be able to set before the race? Another investigation that followed from this discovery had as its object the nature of the new forms of energy that evidently filled interstellar space. This was the province of the families devoted to astrophysics. They produced apparatus for isolating each type of energy which seemed to have full action only in a vacuum, and they experimented with it in an innumerable variety of ways so as to find out its characteristics. The force of gravitation had been familiar to them even in primitive ages, and had long been investigated so as to reveal many of the qualities of its action that were unperceived by ordinary senses. Electricity had been one of the commonest of their phenomena, and recently a vast unknown region had been opened up by them, lying between the verge of eye-awakening light and the verge of the fearless awakening electricity which their machines had made plain even to untrained senses. For generations they had passed with ease in their innumars or spectroscopes beyond the bands of color that affected their eye, and the unseen race had yielded most of their secrets to them. In their lavalands or vacuum energy mirrors they had traced the characteristics of the torrents of energy which tore away from the negative pole of their batteries, and now they had to face a new form of radiant energy. The product of these negative streams and of the irrelinium which they struck. Experimenting with it in their lavalands they found it different from its parent energy. By passing through the irrelium it had grown indifferent to the power of magnetism. This peculiarity enabled them to investigate the inner nature of magnetism, for on the two sides of an irrelinium sheet they had the same electric rays acting differently towards a magnet. On the one side they could be deflected by it, on the other they went on their way as if it were not there. The difference was also used in producing a new kind of electric motor, governed by an irrelinium film which closed or opened a channel of magnetic influence. A third useful application of the discovery was a new irrelinium covering for the head and the body, that milked the east wind of its deleterious qualities. And a fourth was an apparatus for finding by the aid of a magnet the stuff of irrelinium with greater certainty in their lavalands. But the discoveries that flowed from this were still more important. By further experimentation they found another type of radiant energy that behaved in a similar way towards gravitation. In a vacuum formed within a vessel of an alloy of irrelinium it ceased to obey the force of gravity, but as soon as it had passed through the side of the vessel it gave full heed to the force. Within a few months after this had been discovered, there had been invented a phylena that fell or rose according as the new rays were intercepted by a film of the irrelinium alloy or were allowed free passage in vacuole. The energy and mass drove the car on indifferent to the Earth's influence, or at the well of the guide brought the air of phylena, as they called it, gently sloping downwards at any angle required to the surface of the globe. A pioneering book at once developed the results of this discovery and invention. It showed how a way was now open to other stars. For this new radiant energy was found to stream in and pass the Earth's atmosphere in vast currents. The denser the medium, the more it was absorbed and lost, so that in the Earth and the atmosphere it seldom or never manifested itself. Hence the long ages of scientific investigation before it was discovered. By means of these currents, which evidently set through space in definite directions, they would be able to guide their new anti-gravitational phylena to any point in the interstellar ether, and be able to keep up the supply of force that would drive it. And when they approached a new world, they could, by means of their new machinery, bring its force of gravitation to bear on the car and so hasten its flight, and they would be able to hover over the atmosphere by means of the alternating movements of their engine, till they could find out its conditions, and see whether it would be safe to land on it or not. What they wanted yet was the evolution of their physical system in the direction of living in ether or in various atmospheres indifferently. It pointed out to the physiological families the way that would lead in this direction, and it showed how, though it would take countless ages, it was yet within the scope of their humanity. For their knowledge of the Constitution of the Universe, the discovery of these two forms of radiant energy proved to be of great importance. They were able to find out the relationship of gravitation, electricity, the dark rays of the ennemar, the negative rays of the lavalan, light, heat, and the two new types of energy. And by means of the similarities and differences found to exist between any two of them, they were enabled to resolve the molecules of any element into their constituent atoms, and thus to reveal the characteristics of the fundamental ether. They felt that they were at last in the immediate presence of the medium which filled space, and they invented an apparatus isolating the ether from all the forms it enters into, so that it became manifest under their magnifiers to several of their senses. In it they were able to make any one of the forms of energy move and play. From it they were able to mold many of the terrain forms of latent energy, and they hoped to mold most of the others with which they were familiar. One of the most immediately practical results that came from the discovery of these two modes of energy was another kind of engine, which almost doubled their store of force in RIMLA. The main form of it took advantage of the radiant energy that showed indifference or obedience to gravitation according as it played in a vacuum or through an alloy of a rillinium into the air. The new rays lifted a piston in vacuole, and by an automatic arrangement they passed through a film of the alloy and then allowed gravitation to fold them and the piston with them back into its first position. The rapid alternations drove magnetic machinery which produced and stored up electricity. Another form of the new engine used the difference between the conduct the other newly discovered radiant energy displayed towards magnets when it played in a vacuum vessel of rillinium, and when it had issued through the vessel's filmy side. The increase in concentration of force in their island was one of the great subordinate aims of their civilization, for they knew that the greater the power they had command of, the more rapidly they could advance towards higher and higher goals. Greater force meant greater dominion over nature and her secrets and laws, and this implied accelerated speed in progress. It had been one of the primitive blunders of their civilization, as it still was of all other civilizations. To imagine that extended empire over men meant a true development of humanity, wide sovereignty was mere artificial change of the locality and application of the forces of mankind without increasing them. It was but a shuffling of the cards, to use your similes, with all the honors in one hand instead of being distributed overall. It was merely political and not real. Any gain that might come from the concentration of power and wealth was wasted on increased war material and military expeditions for retaining or subduing territories and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and on growth of court splendor and luxury. The pursuit of the sanguinary fandom of power over other men had to be forever abandoned before any real human advance could be made. Empire over the powers of nature was the primary condition of full development of human possibilities, and every tissue of their wonderful brains was strained to its utmost for the rapid extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores of the center of force, a new source of energy, was therefore ever hailed by them as of the warranty of a leap upward and onward into the future. The inventions of these new engines then had no slight significance as events in their history, and the assurance of more and more rapid progress was increased by a discovery of the Kemic families in the same direction. They had used coal for the generation of heat before they had left their primeval home around the South Pole. But in their more tropical archipelago they found no coal beds, the islands having originated in volcanic and coral formation, and the climate made the use of such concentrated fuel unnecessary. It was warm even in winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals which needed little cooking. The forests of the island had furnished whatever fuel had been required for hundreds of generations, and outside of Lymanora they were still sufficient for all purposes. But the center of force had recalled the great heat they used to have from coal, and the Lyomo, in their probings of the earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of the old fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so deep in the earth that it was of little value to them. But a discovery by the Sidremo, or Kemic families, made them reconsider this decision and try to invent some form of the Lyomaran, which would cut and send with ease to the surface of the earth the coal they had found. The Sidremo had experimented with it in various lines. They had made the steam from it give power as they had seen it give power to the daydream and her brulean imitations. But so large a portion of the latent energy in it had been lost in the process that they turned their researches in other directions. Before long they found that, when the coal was placed in a chemical solution containing comparatively common and cheap elements, electric power was largely generated. And following up their discovery, the Sidremo were soon able to draw electricity from any of the rocks of the island. Once having had their attention applied to such problems, they made a number of them surrender their secret, by surrounding one common rock, e.g. with a certain solution they brought from it heat alone. But the discovery most important for the development of the race was that which brought electric power directly from the rocks and even from the earth. For this increased the possible stores of force in RIMLA enormously. And there was no limit to what they might use there for the advancement of the civilization. Within a few days of this discovery the Pyramo or meteorological families had applied the lavaland to one of their long unsolved problems, the extraction of magnetic power in large quantities from the air. They had been already able to draw from the thunderclouds their electricity and make them pass harmless. And by means of personal effort and the magnetism of the body, they were able, when high up in the rarer regions of the atmosphere, to recharge their little shoulder engines for driving their wings. But in the lower air they had failed to draw electricity from any but thunderclouds in any quantity. They based a new apparatus called Pyrrachno on the lavaland and its discoveries, and with this they were able to draw magnetism from even the gentlest breeze. They increased its size and capacity, and soon could give it a daily supply of new power to the center of force. Nor did this deprive the air of the island of its exhilarant quality, for the more they took from it the more seemed to flow in from surrounding space. But, when the east wind blew, they found the inflow of magnetism too much for their smaller Pyrrachnos, only the larger could cope with it. And then the store of power in Rymla received enormous additions. For ages they had been testing the amount of magnetism in the air at various heights and temperatures and various times of day, month, and year, and recording the results of their investigations. They were now able to decide from these and from their experiences of the Pyrranco that irregular changes in the weather were due chiefly to magnetic influence. They saw that the tremendous storms which every few years swept the earth had their origins in exceptional inflows of cosmic magnetism. During the history of man since he had come to self-consciousness and to the habit of recording his own movements, there had been many sudden and temporary climatic changes that had led to vast displacements in the inhabitants of the earth. A series of severe winders in the north and in the temperature zone would strip the trees and fields of all Frugiferous qualities and drive the animals of the chase away to the south in search of food. And the races of man had to follow them. So in the tropics a series of droughts would destroy half the chances of life and exterminate one-third of the dwellers inland. As a rule the agony there led to no displacement of nations. So passive and fatalistic are they by nature near the equator. But in times when some new religious idea had broken the spell of fatalism the first goat of starvation drove hordes to search for food in other zones. Oftentimes there has been a simultaneity in the meteorological severity, partly due to a universal influx of interstellar magnetism, but still more to the fact that the earth and the planetary system to which it belongs have swung into a region of space that is exceptionally barren of all life impetus. At such periods came those widespread migrations of the dwellers on the globe that made new eras in history. It was one of those cosmic disturbances of climate that sent the Arabs out of their deserts, a flaming portent along the shores of the Mediterranean with their newly reformed religion. The creed of Muhammad and at the same moment flung the Saxons against the northern frontier of Charlemagne's empire and the Danes on the coast of Britain. So earlier, in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, the Huns burst from the east like a torrent and again and again swept all before them in the west, will simultaneously the Goths broke in from the north across the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Later, in the ninth century, the Danes and Normans broke away from the north again and again and plagued Europe with their piratical energy in the very period when Magyars were migrating from the east to the west. And it was only the closer packing of the continents and the consequent military organization of European nations that checked these displacements in later centuries, though there were refluxes towards the east, as in the Crusades. But the cosmic meteorology of the earth took different effect in the same direction. When plagues mowed down their millions of victims from east to west, where widespread displacements were impossible, there must be dissemination by some cosmic means in order to let the light in to the overpopulated regions. Another escape valve was found for the pressure of those periods of temporary climactic change when the western peoples were driven over the ocean to find a home. Immigration then came to mean transference of masses across the sea, at first to America, where there were other but weaker civilizations to be overcome, afterwards to lands and islands that were either empty or occupied by a few scattered savages. It was their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of Rialaro from the effect of these vast displacements of population. When every acre of land on the earth shall have been filled with its complement, and human forethought and ingenuity are still unequal to the sudden changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague will be the only means of relieving the pressure.