Limanora

CHAPTER XVII
MY EDUCATION CONTINUED

THE gaze into the probabilities of the future and into the realities of the past ejected from my system whatever of dangerous admiration I might have felt for the career of such a military adventurer as Choktroo. In spite of my self-control and rapidly developing reasoning faculty, there lurked in me the same longing for power that had been so evident in my cabin-boy. Though he had fallen so wretchedly there was a romance about his career which appealed to something deep-seated in my spirit. I knew what a hypocrite and scoundrel he had become in order to make his success, yet the success seemed to condone his offences against the progress of humanity. The lust of rule that lies in the hearts of all men had not yet been eradicated from mine. I had advanced so far as to be ashamed of it; and I tried to reason it down or to conceal even from myself the fact of its existence; but my guardians knew that it was there, and they took the necessary precautions against its growth. Thus did I pass with the whole people through the national purification ending with a glimpse of their heaven and their hell.

And now I was ready to re-enter on my process of education. The more spiritual portions of my nature had been remoulded or confirmed to follow in the true path of Limanoran development. The last purificatory process had revealed in me the virtuous or progressive balance that ensured success in the island. The minds of my guardians were now at rest with regard to my spiritual future, and I was on the fair way to become one of the community.

Still my physical constitution lagged far behind the race. Nor had I any hope of ever making up this lost time, so much had the education of generations and the accumulations of heredity done for them. My senses were but feebly developed compared with those of the Limanorans; and though they gave sensuous faculties a far lower place than the most advanced thinkers I had ever known of in Europe, they by no means neglected them, but considered them important instruments of progress in the material conditions of their life.

My proparents thought it necessary that I should be brought in the development of my sensuous perceptions nearer to their own level, now that my love of reason was so strong as to preclude the possibility of being overwhelmed by sensuous energy. They began with the most intellectual of the senses, the eyesight, and by the help of magnetism, hypnotic suggestion, and constant practice under their tuition, they soon brought me to see farther afield and more keenly into the structure of things around me than I had in Europe thought it possible for the human eye to accomplish. I could perceive with the naked eye stars that I had been able to see before only through the telescope. I began to note the changes of tissue underneath the skull of my neighbours when any great thought or emotion stirred in them, and could use their wonderful instruments of far and near research with appreciation. Through these instruments faint stars appeared moons, and the nearer planets revealed many of the secrets of their surface; whilst the elements resolved themselves into even simpler constituents. What still lay beyond I could not imagine, yet there were manifestly worlds, intensive and extensive, still to be explored beyond the limits of these aids to sight.

In the life of an individual I could not expect to approach the development of optic faculty attained by this people. This impressed itself more deeply upon me when my guardians tried to evolve in me the magnetic power of eye which every Limanoran had by nature. When any one of them turned his full glance upon me, it was like encountering the direct beams of the sun; I had to drop my eyelids in self-defence. It was this that gave them such hypnotic power over Choktroo and his followers. Their eye was an active exponent of the soul within as well as a passive recipient of messages from the world without, and could concentrate into its glance the energy of their powerful wills. Any one of these Limanorans amongst the feebler-eyed millions of the rest of the world would have proved himself a master-spirit. He would, with his unhesitating will and the magnetism of his eye, have kept masses of men in check and moulded them into a unity, and the great commanders of history would have blenched before his gaze.

From the first I had felt uneasy under the full glance of my island friends, in spite of its kindliness and benevolence. Before I left England, I had been supposed to have the mesmeric faculty to an exceptional degree. Now I found it pale before those marvellous Limanoran eyes, and all the training and physical aid my proparents could give me in this direction, though they added greatly to my energy of will and eye, only brought out my hopeless inferiority. I was able at last to bear their glances with ease, and even to raise my eyes to theirs for a few seconds; but I ceased to hope for the attainment of their ocular command or their magnetic power.

Even their passive electric sense was far beyond my possibility in many of its ramifications. For years I had wondered why their couriers into far regions of the sky could without any chart or landmarks find their way back to their island home with such ease. It could not be by means of vision; for they often went flying above the clouds to the antipodes; nor could it be by smell; for that sense was not nearly so much developed as the others. In some of my now more distant flights with Thyriel I discovered that they homed by the electric sense. It had become keen in the measurements of amounts of electricity; and every locality had its own electric possibilities, not to speak of a certain peculiar quality in its electricity which differentiated it from all others. One of the most important branches of their education was the magnetography of the earth and sky. Although I never got beyond a vague perception of differences in the degrees of electricity, it was of some use to me in my flights to have learned the elements of this great descriptive science. I could tell with fair accuracy how high I was above the earth and whether I was drifting away from Limanora or towards it; for the amount of electricity in any region varied within certain definite limits and the conditions governing it were constant for long periods of time; these were, roughly, the metals beneath the surface of the earth, the differences in temperature of the strata of air above, the evaporation and chemical changes on the earth below, and the periodicity of the influence of the sun and the stars. Their electric charts of the sky and air were ever in process of correction, but so slightly and gradually in each region that it was only after long periods that the Limanoran couriers had to revise their magnetographic knowledge; indeed it was their reports after long flights which generally led to the minute corrections of their charts. It was the work of a few minutes only to learn the new modifications, for their charts were exact miniature models of that which they were intended to represent; the learner had only to touch a spring and by the inner mechanism of the globe out would ray to each point of it the electricities that in degree and quality belonged to the region indicated; the member of the electric family who guided him would explain the changes that had occurred since he last consulted the instrument, and his own electric sense would tell him the rest.

Nor was this magnetographic training useful merely for the purpose of pilotage through the heavenly vault. It enabled any courier to seek the region where he would most easily recharge the little engines which he bore with him under his arms to aid in his wing journey. Although he could prevent the complete exhaustion of these power auxiliaries by supplying them with some of the magnetism in his own body, it was only in emergencies that he did this; for his own system needed electric recuperation as well. Whenever this was required, he made for some region of the air that he knew to be highly electric; and there he floated, whilst with his receptive sense he drew in new stores for his own system and for his little armpit engines. Then he went on his way rejoicing, exhilarated by his new energy. One of the purposes of their frequent flight into atmospheric spheres other than their own was to drink in new magnetism from one of the great sky fountains.

When a Limanoran returned from an aërial flight there was renewed life in him. His eyes glowed with a heightened radiancy; I could see a soft light play about them in the dark, and this, if needed, he could make even piercing in its brilliancy. He required no light to guide him in the deepest night. His electric sense gathered in from the atmosphere the scattered radiance that was hidden from my sight; and from his eyes he could emit this electricity in the form of light. For me, who, under all their training, was never able to develop such power over the unseen forces of the air, the eyes of Thyriel were a guide in our flight through the night sky; and by day so gentle a brilliance played around them it was little wonder they fascinated and drew me ever to them. After experiencing their power, I was not surprised at the hypnotic influence Limanoran eyes had had over the leaders of the hostile expedition.

It did not astonish me to find that by means of their electric energy they could move vast masses which no mere muscular force could have touched. I had a constitution that seemed to be physically far stronger than Thyriel’s; yet, if she had time to reinforce her store of magnetism, she could accomplish feats of strength I could not approach. In her fragile system there seemed to reside a giant’s energy; but this was only at times, and especially after she had made some long journey into the regions of the air. The tissues and fibres of her body seemed to grow tenfold stronger when the new electric energy tingled along her nerves. In only the faintest way was I ever able to develop my electric-receptive sense so far as to realise what a new store meant to their physical powers.

Yet my guardians set themselves to bring out my latent electric sense or firla. After much practice and the application of many stimuli I began to feel impulses more keenly even when they came from a distance: the back of my neck grew more and more sensitive, so that I would wheel round instinctively when anyone looked at me from behind. There was almost hope that I should, after many years’ practice, come to distinguish the different kinds of emotion with which anyone, though unseen, might look at me; and I could produce by a concentration of will-force in the eyes a certain luminosity, noticeable when I stood in deep darkness.

My power of sight was greatly strengthened by this new electric faculty that the eyes acquired. I began to raise my eyelids before the penetrative glance of a Limanoran, or even the full majesty of the sun; but never could I hope to reach their analytic power of vision. Their senses were distinguished from those of the rest of mankind by intellectuality, and were, I thought, not merely the observers and reporters of the mind, but its outlying parts or functions. The eye especially seemed to do what through its means reason and experiment might have done. At a glance a Limanoran would tell to an inch the distance of any object, and was not far wrong in his estimate of the space between the earth and any star when its rays reached his eye. He could distinguish one ray from another by its colour or colour-constituents and by its magnetic affinities. What he had learned in the use of the inamar or spectroscope in the lava wells and in the fusion of metals in Rimla had come to be a visual instinct. With scarcely a minute’s hesitation he would tell the predominant elements in any one of the heavenly bodies. Doubtless the firla had something to do with this analytic power. One of their imaginative pioneering books held out the by no means remote possibility of catching symptoms of the life which, they knew well, filled the dim worlds above.

Their auditory powers had been far less developed than their visual, and gave but faint hope of transcending interstellar space, and my training soon brought me within easy distance of their hearing capacity. The range of this faculty both at its upper and its lower limit had been considerably extended. Sounds dangerous on account of their loudness to the inner mechanism of ordinary ears were by means partly of strengthening the protective cartilages and partly of a trevamolan or graduated modifier of sound, which they constantly wore, made harmless and even gentle and enjoyable. Those that were too faint to reach any human ear became audible to me after some training in the use of their vamolans or makro-mikrakousts. So greatly had these been improved along with the power of hearing that they could discriminate the different noises of microscopic life. These vamolans in their application of electricity to hearing could make the buzzing of an insect sound like the roar of thunder. By modifications of them any of the sounds heard through them could be recorded for ever.

Thus had been formed a library and museum of the phonology of animal life. They had been able to study the records of sounds emitted by the various species of animals and had come to know the meaning of each sound before they had driven all but microscopic life from the island; thus they had learned by means of the recording vamolans the language of animals. The birds of the air I have seen follow the cries of Thyriel, gathering around her in clouds, as she flew, until by a sudden change of tone she would scatter the fluttering masses to the four winds. Even the fish of the sea would rise and leap above the waves to her notes; ferocious, devouring monsters would leave their prey and follow gently in her train. Most of this power over the undeveloped creation was due to the record and study of their cries; but not all. The magnetism of her personality had a strange effect upon the wildest birds of prey: it seemed to bear with it tacitly the lesson of Limanoran civilisation that no life was to be destroyed by those who meant to make the best of life; there was a gentle, merciful spirit in the glow of the eyes. I have seen her take a wounded bird to her bosom as she flew, and, putting new life into it by the stroke of her fingers, set it free, strong and happy.

There was a life-giving power in the tips of Limanoran fingers that puzzled me at first. Why the mere touch should so soothe the lower creation that the agony of their wounds would soon vanish and their cries cease bewildered me for a time. My own pains rapidly disappeared under the touch of my proparents. I afterwards knew that part of the active magnetism of their system came through their fingers and they helped me to develop this channel of influence in myself. I could at last by passing my fingers over Thyriel’s hair or face relieve any tension of her nerves which might have produced pain; nay, I could hear her hair crackle under my touch when I had charged my system with much electricity. Once or twice I was able to draw a wounded bird to me, and change by my stroke on the feathers its cries of pain into low notes of content; but I could never draw the winged creation to me in clouds as Thyriel did.

It was all the more surprising to me that they fenced off animal life from their island. What might they not have done with such powers over the lower creation? When I put my question into words, the answer was unhesitating and unanswerable. All failures in development had to be thrust from the path of progress; they could do nothing but clog it. If the Limanorans had little hesitation in the case of their own flesh and blood, they had still less when they had to deal with animals. It was quite true that many of the more highly developed of the servants of man had nobler natures than most of their masters, deeper loyalty, greater sincerity, truer and more lasting courage; much might and did come from companionship with their primitive and guilt-proof natures; but the fact that when associated with man they were destined to serve, made such good impracticable and rather brought out the mean and brutal tyranny of man than helped to implant in his nature their own virtues. Even with such noble qualities as they had it was impossible for them to overleap the many ages their systems had lagged behind in other respects, the open offensiveness of their grosser animal appetites and needs, their lack of that great instrument and teacher of the brain, a fully developed hand, and the inability to foresee beyond a few hours, days, or months. Nor could any human process prolong their period of life and postpone their day of dissolution. It was not a good thing for these pioneers of the human race to see the approach of death and its agonies in a being that could not assuage or postpone it. Still less beneficial was it to touch the carcases and reduce them to harmless atoms. The presence of animals meant the daily obtrusion of offensive sights that would either shock or degrade their natures. All that animals could do for them was already done by their science or their machinery. Nothing that had fallen so far behind in the race of life was worth the trouble of missionaryism; for the energy that was in it had a better chance of rising swiftly in the scale of existence by dissolution and entrance into some other form.

None the less had they studied the language of animals when they had had the opportunity. It belonged to the orchestration of the world, and all the sounds of nature were of interest to them. They were in the habit of visualising what they heard by a refined and complicated instrument which they called a thinamar, and had long been able to translate into its appropriate form and colour every sound, inarticulate as well as articulate. Through long use of this instrument the tones of nature bore with them something that appealed to their eye. I never grew expert enough in its use to make the visualisation of sound an instinct; still less could I reverse the process. A modification of their thinamar had enabled them to translate sights into the symbols of sound, and by skill in using it they had come to attach certain notes to certain sights. Thus a noble landscape would appeal to their imagination not only through the eye, but in the form of music, and they spoke of hearing the beauty of a star or a flower. A section of this instrument did for complicated sounds what the spectroscope, or inamar as they called it, did for light. Every substance, every individual living thing, had its natural and peculiar note; and the linamar analysed what seemed to me the simplest sound into its constituent primary notes, each of which revealed its source. Aided by their mikrakousts and makrakousts, it enabled the Limanorans to analyse the chemical elements of any object, whether at a great distance from them or too minute to appeal to their senses.

Their makrakousts were instruments which by means of electric currents and magnetism could make a beam of light transmit any sound to its source, or make the ear gather in the same way whatsoever sounds were filling the air at any point on its course. I knew when I saw a steady flash in any direction that the sound of some point was getting tapped by one of these instruments. Each had an apparatus for laying and keeping fixed its luminous telegraph-wire along which it received and transmitted. An application of this in the gossip-telegraph enabled them to listen to the comedy of life as it went on in any one of the adjacent islands of the archipelago. Their mikrakousts used the same means for gathering the faint sounds which echoed from the clouds or through the upper regions of the atmosphere and turning them into loud notes, which might be recorded, analysed, and interpreted. Their magnifying power was quite equal to that of the clirolan. Faint buzzings of insects at vast distances could be collected and made as loud as thunder. It was even applied to cosmic sounds that impinged on the atmospheric envelope of the earth. Mikrakoustic balloons rose into the upper air, and after gathering whatever faint sounds wandered thither from outside the world, were drawn back again to divulge their secrets; eavesdroppers of the cosmos they were, and perchance in some future age they would enable the Limanoran to listen to voices from other worlds or even to communicate with the dwellers there. A more immediate and practical advantage of these instruments was found in medicine. They told in clear accents the unexpected or dangerous changes in the tissues or organs of any man’s system. They were used in the weekly medical inspection, which every member of the commonwealth underwent. When the keen eye, aided by the camera-microscope, could detect nothing abnormal in the body, the mikrakoust would tell the examiner’s ear of some obstruction or deleterious change; he knew the normal sounds of healthy action in every part when they were magnified thousands of times by this instrument, and every departure from them readily caught the ear. All the citizens were trained to use it as an aid in diagnosis, so that they might be able to locate in the system any beginning of disease. It was part of the training of my ear to use the mikrakoust and to interpret its physiological revelations.

But these instruments were getting antiquated by the rapid development of the electric sense that could, by the aid of their various electro-magnifiers and analysers, gather in cosmic news from distances which the sense of hearing and its aids would count infinite. Magnetic kites and balloons rose to the uttermost fringe of our atmosphere, whither common terrestrial influences could reach only in such faint waves as to be neutralised; there they gathered the electric impressions and impulses coming from other planets and even other systems. On them were recorded the varying strengths of the waves and their direction. From these records the astronomical families could tell what was happening of a cosmic character in universes far out of the reach of even their lavidrolans or camera-telescopes,—perturbations in the atmospheres of great unseen suns, collisions between worlds that circled round them, births of new universes from these lost systems, periodic disturbances of the routine revolutions through the approach of some meteoric wanderer, the settlement of life on worlds grown ripe for it, and the death of outworn stars. For many generations had they kept and classified these reports of cosmic history and were beginning to recognise a wide periodicity in many of them and to draw conclusions as to the path of our universe through infinite space. It seemed to them that there was some point far distant in the cosmos, round which our sun and its satellites with innumerable other systems of stars revolved, and that this point, with its satellites, had its own independent movement. Age by age, with the aid of their idrolans or electric telescopes, and other electric instruments, they felt that they were getting nearer and nearer to the centre of this interwoven epicycloidal movement and were almost convinced that it did not proceed infinitely, but that there was some ultimate centre which had no movement round another. Their instincts told them that this was the divine consciousness towards which all things rose in the scale of being. They never remitted their ardour and diligence in the development of their electric sense and of the instruments that aided it to become a receiver of cosmic news and a recorder of cosmic history, for they were confident that this was one of the tracks that led up through the intricacy of the cosmos to God.

One of my greatest regrets was that my electric sense could not follow the footsteps of these pioneers in the infinite; it had but a dim consciousness of the reports of their instruments, and train it as eagerly and diligently as I would, it lagged behind my power of vision and even my sense of hearing. On this account I preferred to learn the results of their researches through these two senses, for the electric reports were carefully translated into appeals to the eye and the ear. I could see their wonderful discoveries in the unknown, as they worked them into picture and mechanism, and I could listen from day to day to the orchestration of their newly discovered spaces and movements. What seemed at the moment an intolerable discord chimed in with the notes which preceded or followed and formed marvellous harmony. Not the least part of my education lay in this cosmic stimulus to my imagination. Out of my terrestrial conditions and limits I daily rose into spheres which seemed to me more and more divine. Sight and hearing became noble channels of the influences of infinity, instead of gross senses. I struggled to bring my firla up to the enjoyment of their labours, but ever fell back hopeless.

This was especially the case when I was brought to examine and test their monalan or electrical distance-analyst, for a fully developed electric sense was needed to appreciate its refined analysis of impulses from far distances. It was an ingenious application of an alloy called by them labramor, or electricity sponge, and had the power of splitting up any electric wave or impulse into its constituent movements. Each of these had its own clear and distinct effect upon the firla and varied with the substance from which the impulse came or through which it passed. All substances and elements in the terrestrial system were classified according to their electric impulses. Even before the Limanorans brought the firla to its high state of sensitiveness and efficiency, they had been able to examine the stars and other distant bodies and analyse their elements by means of this classification and the application of their alloy, labramor. Every substance or element had its place in their tables according as it was positive or negative in its electric impulse towards some other substance or element; and all its affinities, strong or weak, were tabulated. Thus when they turned their monalan upon any distant body like a star they were able to analyse its elements by means of these tables. Even now that their firla interpreted the analysis of the monalan without the intervention of classifications and tables, they had another electrically analystic instrument which appealed to the eye; this turned the electric impulse into a flash or glow, which at once revealed in the inamar or spectroscope the substances or elements whence it had come.

Their lower or more material senses I was more nearly able to approach, even though they too were highly intellectualised and were more the servants of the spirit than of the animal part. In developing mine I had more hope of raising myself to the Limanoran level, and yet there was less stimulus; for I felt that they looked down upon these senses of smell, taste, and touch because of their need of close contact with their objects; they were the primitive senses; they were narrow and bound down to immediate matter, and seemed poor gropers in the finite and the dark compared with those rangers of infinity, the ear, the eye, and the electric sense. It was then with a feeling of humiliation that I saw those lower and more finite senses in me develop so quickly, proving me a being of a more primitive and material type.

Yet there was no neglect of these in their education and no contempt for them and their uses; in fact contempt was one of the vices that they had with most pains weeded out of their systems and civilisation. They had not merely considered that nothing in creation, if looked into scientifically, was worthy of contempt, but that contempt was the truest symptom of crudity of character and ignorance of reality and nature. Even if they had had any remains of this primal savagery, they would not have felt it towards those finite-seeking senses. They only set themselves to make them more and more the servants of the soul, the instruments of the imagination. They rejected the idea that the arts belonged only to sight and hearing. Their arts of the firla were far more important and striking than any sculpture or painting or music could be. Not merely as a variation on these and a relief from them did they have arts that brought in the senses of smell and taste and touch; these had their own special uses in their civilisation. All of them, but especially smell and taste, were closely linked with memory, and through memory with imagination. A special perfume and even a special taste would flash before the mind a scene or fact with more vividness than even a piece of music would.

The perfumes and tastes had been classified according to their affinity to certain virtues and ideas and to the great deeds and scenes which best represented them. The island was one vast flower-garden at all seasons of the year, arranged not alone to please the eye, but to bring by the suggestion of their perfumes the noblest virtues and deeds constantly into the mind. For example, wherever a child or youth was being trained, the flowers possessing certain well-known scents which were closely connected with the finest qualities and ideas of the race shone profusely yet with striking art. The art of the gardening family did not consist merely in arrangement of the landscape and the varied coloration of it. The scent of every flower had to be taken into consideration and the faint flavour or taste the seed or fruit might produce in the air when sent adrift or bruised. The problem of no science or art was so complicated as that of gardening in this island, it had to take account of so many senses, seasons, and conditions of growth. They were never done with creating and selecting new variations of flowers and plants, and colour, scent, and taste in the vegetable world were as adaptable in their hands as tones in the hands of their musical composers. Their task was made comparatively easy by the great development of methods and appliances for rapid growth and decay. They had not only complete command of the weather and clouds and sunshine; but they could bring up and perfect flowers in a few nights over vast areas by the use of their streams and watering platforms and of artificial light. When the Limanorans slept, wonders were being accomplished in colouring the landscape; for first some of their great rivers would pour refreshing rain all over the plains; and then the electric glow, brought close over the plants, would develop their bloom-producing capacity. As careful were the gardeners that no withering or dead vegetable matter should ever taint the air of the island; the moment one set of blossoms had perfected and shown traces of decay, an electric pruner ran in a few minutes over the whole area, and not merely cut them off, but burnt them to dust that fell on the roots to stimulate the new growth of the plants. As soon as the plants had passed their bloom-productive point, an electric life-destroyer ploughed lightly through the soil in all directions; and by the morning what had been profusely flower-coloured the day before was brown earth, ready for the new plant-growth of next day. The slow-growing perennials and bushes and trees occupied separate and fixed quarters at a distance from the residences and the great centres of intercourse, and all rampant vegetation and rotting boughs and leaves were daily turned into good soil by the electric weed-destroyer. No decay was ever allowed to approach the senses. Their knowledge of the secrets of the soil made them independent of rotting or offensive manures. The particular elements of which any kind of plant or flower robbed the soil were accurately ascertained, and their chemistry enabled them with ease to supply the deficiency after a crop had been removed.

The gardening family had to be familiar on the one hand with the innermost secrets of psychology, and on the other with the last discoveries of the more material sciences; for no one could avoid the effects of the flowers and trees, as he could painting and sculpture, music and firlamai. Gardening, in short, was the most public of all the arts and the most pervasive in its results. A garden (and in Limanora there was only one vast garden) was a great mnemonic instrument, which could play upon the souls of the whole community at once. That it should not be in the hands of novices, or of unwise or wrong-thoughted men and women, was one of the prime cares of the people. Of all families those that managed the garden of the island had to be most simple-hearted and true, most sure in their knowledge of the human heart, and most eager to stir to what is great and noble and humane. They were the lords of the sense of smell, one of the most immediate portals to memory and to imagination. To have the complete command of one out of the six dominant sense-entrances to the soul was, they considered, the greatest of responsibilities, and no care was neglected in selecting, purifying, and training the families of gardeners.

They, too, had the superintendence of Ilarime, a structure devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and sound combined. Aided by the musicians and the chemists, they produced symphonies which appealed to all three senses and roused the imagination to exceptional flights. The imaginative or pioneering families frequented the halls of this great building daily in pursuit of new stimulus to their faculty. Every chamber in it had special emotions to rouse. A garden could have only a mingled effect upon the memory and mnemonic imagination; Ilarime separated the effects and classified the emotions and imaginative ideas which were to be stimulated. Anyone entering could find out at the porch, either by looking in the index-chamber or by consulting one of the superintendents, what hall or halls he ought to rest in. I had often during my education to take refuge in Ilarime, when clogged in my endeavours to advance by dulness of memory or imagination or by the weakness of some emotion. After a time I did not need to consult a guide; I knew what element in my soul was deficient and what emotion or memory would stir it to activity, and by aid of the index-hall and its graphic representation of the effect of every chamber upon the spirit I could choose what symphony I needed. As soon as I had entered the hall that I had chosen, I lay down on one of their hanging rests and shut my eyes. At once the medicated atmosphere began to affect my palate, whilst the delicate perfume entered my nostrils and my ears drank in the sweet-sounding music. Before many minutes had passed memories of striking scents I had witnessed or heard of or seen represented in the island began to rise in my mind, and the emotion I needed thrilled me through; if it was heroism or courage, I felt myself urged to deeds of valour; if it was benevolence, I was soon inclined to rush to the help of the suffering and the poor; if it was hope, I saw bright visions of the future.

But this exercise was too passive to be allowed for any length of time. The imagination and emotions were apt to gain at the expense of the will and the nervous energy by too frequent resort to Ilarime. Strenuous endeavour was held to be one of the prime essentials of progress, not only in the race, but even more in the individual. And, though all the prevailing odours and tastes and sounds of the island were agreeable, the Limanorans carried with them a small instrument, called margol, that by an adaptation of electricity could blunt at will the acuteness of smelling and tasting and hearing, and, on the other hand, reduce the powers of perfumes and flavours and sounds; it acted by drying the air around the head and drawing the moisture and heat from the nostrils, the tongue, and the ears. It was partly to mitigate the force of smells and tastes and sounds that they always kept the atmosphere dry and cool by day. In the margol, too, there was a combination of chemicals and electricity which would modify any odour or flavour to suit the taste; but if they wished to increase the strength of any perfume or taste, they applied electric heat to the source of it, and moistened the nostrils and the mouth. It was one of the new peculiarities of the race that the mucous and salivary flow was under the command of the will, and they could smell and taste with satisfaction to themselves without the aid of moisture on the organs.

Their senses of smell and taste had become by means of their acuteness what they were originally meant to be, the guardians of the throat and the digestion. They told with accuracy the nature of the substances brought to the mouth; whatsoever would be deleterious to the system was offensive. In most civilised peoples what is grateful to the palate and the olfactory nerves is often pernicious to some tissue of the body or some faculty of the mind. Here the two senses were the true friends and protectors of both body and soul; there was no seducing them or bribing them into evil or irrational reports, so completely had they been saturated with reason.

In the medical, chemical, and alimentary 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 odour 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 spiritualised their senses, perfumes formed the quickest stimulus of the masculine imagination and flavours of the feminine. At the food vats it was always the Limanoran women who superintended the flavouring of any compound; whilst 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 recognising 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 odour 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 civilised 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 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 passion itself.

But, preternaturally acute though 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 flavours, and electric impressions. Ages before, the inasan or recorder of light and the linasan or recorder of sound had been brought to a high pitch of perfection; all the colours and forms seen in nature, at whatever distance, could be kept in permanence on irelium-plates and reproduced to the eye by the insertion of the plates in the inasan and the reversal of the instrument. So was it with sounds, however loud or faint; the linasan 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 tastes and electricity had begun to enter largely into education and the stimulance 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 epicurean vices. Now they were nothing if not educational aids. The farosan 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 gustagraph gave incalculable aid to the chemical and alimentary families; without its permanencies of flavour they would have fallen into daily errors in mingling the atmospheres of the halls of sustenance and medication and those of Ilarime. 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 firla 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, nor 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 measurers, they had invented an instrument which for fine adjustment surpassed all of these. It was the airolan or sensometer, and by it the medical families in their weekly review of every system in the community were enabled 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-ascertained laws with the hour and the season, the man’s age, and the temperature and health of his body. The airolan tested, measured, and recorded the regular variations of each Limanoran’s 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 its means they were able to gauge the proper mixture of colours 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 somniferous impulse had come, when it struck on the senses.

It was one of the commonplaces of their policy that whatever could be done by machinery it was waste of skill and energy to do by human labour 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 result that 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 Limanoran 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 it held in Western curriculums, and wondered how the various scientific families could manage their abstruse formulæ and calculations without that science. A people that laid so much stress on exactitude of research as an essential of all scientific progress were surely lax to a degree in failing to train their youth in the various branches of mathematics.

On having my senses tested by the airolan, the thought came uppermost in my mind again; and my proparents 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 key-board; 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 after-lives. 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 imagination seemed stiff and almost ossified compared to the ease and flexibility of those of their sons and daughters. Invention and discovery struck out with unprecedented energy, and the ethical and emotional phase of imagination grew at a marvellous pace; new ideal realms were opened out for morality and practical thought.

The experience threw a remarkable light upon a phenomenon which had puzzled them for generations. After the period of youth the members of the community had to specialise; and for some undiscoverable reason those who devoted themselves to mathematics and the working of abstruse formulæ 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 been completely renewed, children of the most noble-minded, freest, and most imaginative families being substituted for the old members, and trained to fulfil 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 obstinacy as inevitable; they grew accustomed to smiling at the mathematical families as “the omniscients.”

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 practice 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 reverence 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 the 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 civilisation had they not been so frozen in their tissues by the perpetual use of formulæ. They were amazed at their own dulness 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 omniscient, and dealing with a 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 needing exactitude of formulæ and result should be neglected by the community. On 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 formulæ 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 all these formulating instruments. Their brain-energy was not monopolised 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 formula-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 Limanorans 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 a 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 formulæ 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 formulæ 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 measurers of time. I was somewhat surprised that this department should exist, for I had admired every day the power the Limanorans 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-thousandth, or even the millionth, part of a second. One old-fashioned measurer 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 moltas (their smallest measure of length, perhaps about the millionth part of an inch); the vibration in the water reflected a bright light through a microscope and camera combined; and a photograph of the pulsations imprinted itself on a strip of irelium 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 irelium tongue vibrating; this latter 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 volatilise the most refractory of metals and earths; they could reproduce the conditions of the most glowing suns, and also the temperature of the coldest 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 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 magnetometers 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 own new developments had been the consciousness of light all over their skin; they could tell with eyes shut whether it was the 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 four; the sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave exhilaration or even joy; the starshine brought contemplative melancholy; the moonbeam mildly stirred the passions; whilst 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 a nicety 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 superintended the sunbaths in their 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 of 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 rid it of 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 the water of the sea; wherever it did not kill the bacteria completely, it emphasised the bleaching power of sunlight over them and rendered them the allies of the human system in its struggle against all disease and decay. This sterilisation of disease was one of the most important functions of the family. It was they who led the flight-gambols of the Limanorans 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 measurer 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 should move a small mirror delicately hung in vacuo; the reflection of this mirror ran along a graduated scale on which it recorded by bleaching a point of colour, 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 of the range of all human eyes. A more modern and delicate form of the inolan used a microscopic 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 and still untested when I visited the collection of measurers, 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 ridding each ray of its heat and of other forms of energy before it entered the lens; a thermometer measured the heat; and the other elements were absorbed and analysed by a subsidiary apparatus as the beam approached the inolan. Another modification of the apparatus had a prismatic arrangement attached to it, not unlike their inamar, and this broke up the beam of light into its colour components; the inolan measured each separate component, the length of its wave, and the energy required to produce it, its camera also recording 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 astronomic families.

Nor did the extraordinary refinement of these instruments, that were constantly being discovered, interfere in any way with the development of Limanoran 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 specialised 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 specialised 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 vapours that were so faint in their impulse as to be unrecognisable 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 conjuror 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 in a 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 will-centres 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 purer air that fringes the envelope of our earth, and there, half-asleep, I drew into my system the electric elements which went 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 increasing 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 in actively producing magnetic currents. I was even able to cause a faint flash in the darkness by concentrating my will-power in my fingers, and waving them in the air.