OOMALEFA
THESE halls of nutrition and medication were situated on a great
promontory extending miles into the sea. It had been ledged and
bastioned with lava walls, and round the gleaming edifice ran a balcony
or rocky platform, which broke the fury of any ambitious billows that
might threaten the crystal translucence of the walls. Here, overlooking
the sea, the Limanorans could drink in its medicating breath; here in
the vast hall could they take that restful exercise which is the first
essential of all life; here they could commune with their own souls
or with the stars and listen to the ever-changing rhythm of the waves
as they broke into spray or climbed to the rocky wall beneath. They
considered this chamber of the ocean and the stars as more medicant
and alimentary than any they could make with human hands; hence it was
that they had thrown out this great projection into the sea, where they
could spend most of their hours of nutrition.
Along its highest ridge ran a series of the noblest buildings that
ever met my eye, unlike all other edifices I had ever heard of in
style of architecture and method of grouping, but resembling in their
bewildering variety and inherent symmetry the gleaming clusters of
night. Countless points of fire aimed at the heavens from spires and
towers which shone with rainbow fluctuation in the sun. There was a
milky way of jewelled pinnacles; and around were strewn fire-flashing
constellations of jewel minarets and domes. Innumerable centres of
varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by their incompleteness
to some great centre; and soon it rested calmly on the vast yet
ever-broken and changing dome that like a snow-clad mountain-ridge
mastered every spirit that was drawn to it. Alone this galaxy of
clustered starry forms stood out above the sea, undwarfed by any
neighbouring land and masterful over the billows below it. A true
temple was it even in the presence of the universe of suns that
stretched out into endless night. Within it surely might the spirit of
man feel no unholy doubts of its immortal destiny or of its kinship
with the divine. Pure and noble orison might here be raised to the
Maker of the makers of this shrine; all trivial and mean thoughts would
here be sacrilege. When night fell, the stars in the heavens held
spirit communion with this their brother. This was Oomalefa, or the
jewel of immortal longings.
My first visit to Oomalefa is engraved upon the record of my past, for
it was one of my first expeditions under the guidance of Thyriel. The
beauty of her spirit dawned upon me as the day passed; afterwards I
came to see that it was everything that my own needed, but at the time
I could not reason out the nature of my feelings. She grew upon me as
the day upon the night, and when we parted it was as if my sun had set;
helpless and stumbling, my spirit groped for the guiding dawn again; I
was forlorn, reaching out for my other half in a lonely universe.
Her presence doubtless coloured all the scenes through which I passed,
yet they were enough of themselves to impress my mind. We alighted on
the mainland and made our way out towards the archway which spanned
the root of the promontory. The weight of our bodies as we stood upon
a certain spot swung up the transparent portcullis, and we found
ourselves in a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving orrery of the
sky of night, its walls lit pictures of the ocean around framed in
living sections of the sea alive with sea-denizens, its floor a tidal
beach of sand, soft yet firm, whereon the sea ever seemed to cream and
retreat. It had all the beauty and the freshness of the shore beneath
the starred night when the tide is making.
The next chamber we entered was as vast, and was as many-coloured as
the rainbow. It was the index hall; for here were marked the name and
number and situation of every chamber in Oomalefa, and underneath
each name was shown in graphic experiment the effect of the different
medicated atmospheres upon the various tissues of the human body.
Complete reproductions of the bones and muscles, the flesh and
blood, the cells and nerves and coatings were here enclosed and the
transformations pictured in the transparent sections of the walls. An
expert from the family having the manufacture of each atmosphere under
its charge stood by and guided and explained the process. It was a
physiological laboratory, in which every Limanoran might see with his
own eyes and hear explained by one who knew, every modification in
the tissues that a longer or shorter time spent in any chamber would
produce.
Twin with this hall was that of measurement and consultation.
Here every entrant had all his important organs and tissues tested
scientifically, and was then told the atmospheres which would best suit
the development of any or all of his parts and faculties. He stated
the chief purpose of his existence, and consulted the experts on the
directions that would best lead to it. He was told of any defect in
his organic functions and advised how it could be remedied. After this
consultation he could return to the hall of experiment and see with his
own eyes the effect of the various atmospheres upon the unseen portions
of his system. Then he was permitted to enter the halls of nutrition
and medication, and choosing those which he specially needed that day
spent the time required in each. He found exit again by the hall of
measurement, and there another testing revealed whether he had been
successful in his alimentary sojourn in Oomalefa, and whether he would
have to remain longer or have a certain atmosphere introduced into his
sleeping-chamber in his own mansion.
Every Limanoran except the young and undeveloped had as the result
of attention to health in past ages what they called the conscience
of the health. This put them on the alert the moment any function
was disordered, and off they went to Oomalefa to consult the medical
families on the exact nature of the derangement, its locality, and the
diet or treatment that would restore to complete health. Few or none
of full maturity but would feel this sanitary sense within them like a
whip or goad which would not let them rest till the evil element was
swept out. It was a daily occurrence to meet some islander hurrying
post-haste for consultation and medication, and I came at last to be
ashamed of the lethargy which would let me remain inert under some
decay of nerve or tissue in its primary stages until it had resulted in
ache or pain. The feeling of lassitude or the absence of the sense of
the full tide of life made me rush in fear and trembling to the hall
of consultation. In my former existence I had had the embryo of this
sanitary conscience in the pains or prostration accompanying disease,
but then the warning generally came too late. Now I was sensitive
to the slightest derangement of any tissue or part of my system and
without the goad of ache flew to Oomalefa to find the remedy; otherwise
I felt that I was doing wrong to my future and my posterity and to the
future of the whole race. Even the actual present of the people was
affected; the slightest disorder of my constitution seemed to weigh
upon the spirits of my companions and friends, for they believed there
was contagion in every disease. As strongly did they hold that there
was a contagion of health, and would not allow any member of their
medical families or council to approach a citizen even in consultation
unless the healer was himself whole in every atom of his constitution.
To be sound in body and spirit was as sanative of the derangements of
others as any active remedy.
Every citizen was taught enough of the medical science of the island
to know what was wrong in himself or his neighbour; for every citizen
was a possible father or mother; and for parenthood a thorough and
practical acquaintance with the laws of health and the causes and
cures of the commonest diseases was a first essential. The Limanorans
laughed at the absurdity of Western civilisation in allowing men and
women to generate and bring up children with no more knowledge of
their constitution than if they were mere animals. Still oftener they
mourned that so much human generation in the world was left to the
chance dictates of caprice, and that most medicine and education were
only blind groping in the dark. That nothing should be done on mere
authority was one of the first principles of their civilisation.
The medical councillor knew that he had a keen critic in every citizen;
and he had to justify and make clear every process he recommended, in
order that faith in him might remain clear. His sole advantage was his
fuller and deeper knowledge and the faculty he had acquired from long
familiarity with the questions and problems he had to deal with. Each
member of the medical families and council had a special section of the
human system to explore, besides having a mastery of the whole. It was
this division of labour that caused their science of the human tissues
to advance so swiftly. Not a moment of their work was lost.
I had thought at first that a people so healthy and vigorous and
devoted to such wholesome ways of life had no need of medical science;
but I soon saw that their general sanativeness demanded a more advanced
science and art than the rude quackery of Western medicine. All the
worst diseases of maturity in Europe, fevers, consumption, diphtheria,
rheumatism, indigestion, and the rest, were relegated in Limanora to
childhood, and were then as mild and innocuous as scarlatina or measles
or whooping-cough; they had become the enemies of unformed tissues,
and found little to batten upon even in them. Generally they were
checked in their first stage by the medical knowledge of the parents or
proparents, and it was the rarest occurrence to have to resort to the
deeper knowledge of the medical council, rarest of all where childhood
was concerned.
I rushed to the conclusion that the medical families would have nothing
to investigate but the development of the tissues and organs and
faculties as they existed in Limanora; but I was disabused of this idea
by the occurrence of an epidemic in the island not long after I arrived
there. It took the form of dream-disturbed sleep, which held the
faculties in its grasp beyond the usual number of hours of rest. The
patients tossed and moaned and imagined horrors of the past of humanity
and animalhood as still occurring in their lives. It abridged the hours
of consciousness, and left the sufferers spent and unexhilarated.
It was no fever, but only a languor that attacked the imaginative
faculties and made them morbid and secretive in their activities.
My brain-tissues were perhaps not fine enough to be attacked by it,
and I escaped; but I was greatly distressed to find that Thyriel had
been touched by the epidemic. My anxiety led me to know all that the
specialists discovered concerning it. It could not be fatal, they
assured me; for no epidemic had been fatal to Limanorans for many
centuries. It only meant the loss of a valuable portion of the time
of working. In the other islands, the winged scouts brought the news,
it had swept half the populations into the grave; but so vigorous and
healthy were the various tissues of our people that no disease could
produce anything but a temporary derangement.
By means of their skilful surgery they soon isolated under the
microscope some specimens of the living organisms that produced the
disease; they experimented with all the elements and their combinations
and saw what encouraged them, what attenuated them, and what killed
them. It was not long before every trace of the microscopic creature
had vanished from the island; there remained only the knowledge and
the antidote that would enable their outposts or messengers through
the sky to resist its attacks, should they ever encounter it again.
Limanorans who were sent on missions out of the country had to be made
epidemic-proof by inoculation against known diseases before setting
out. But it sometimes happened, especially to scouts into the higher
regions on the outskirts of the earth’s atmosphere, that they brought
back with them symptoms that were new, and a new disease and a new
microbe had to be added to their medical lists. It was explained to
me that our solar system was travelling every moment of its existence
into new regions of space; and as it moved it passed from time to
time through swarms of minute and attenuated life which had been left
myriads of ages before in its tracks by some diseased member of another
system. This microscopic life was in its own special way immortal,
and could subsist on the scattered material life that floated though
the ether unclaimed by any planetary centre. It was out of such waifs
of life peopling space that a new world made a new beginning in vital
history; as soon as it cooled down sufficiently, after creative
collision and separation, to allow of individual existence upon it,
myriads of these microscopic inhabitants of space took possession of
it, and began again the struggle of life which was the universal law
of infinity, and meant the ascension of all energy through higher and
higher circles.
Disease was but a form of this eternal struggle for existence; it
was the attempt of invisible lower forms to master the higher human
tissues and make them their feeding-ground. The original enemies of
man, the wild beasts, were subdued or tamed or driven forth into the
deserts as soon as savage life was passed. Then began the fiercer
contest for the possession of his own cells and tissues and organs.
Enemies that he could not see migrated out of the surrounding elements
into his system as soon as it became delicate enough to stir their
appetite, and for ages there were no weapons against them; chance now
and again offered one; but generally he groped about in his frantic
ignorance for anything that would ease the pain from these gnawing
foes within him. Out of this rose by slow steps a kind of quackery
they called the science of medicine; but the conflict still remained
unequal; the invisible enemies had the best of it, and they were ever
being recruited by new enemies out of space, which bred new and more
appalling plagues. Not till it was found that the newer these settlers
were the more virulent were their ravages was there any chance of a
real science of medicine arising from this everlasting agonism.
The first beginnings of a true science appeared in the attempts to
deplete the soil by setting tamed and exhausted specimens of their
foes to feed on it. A soil once reft of the elements that invited and
fitted any disease germs seldom suffered in any serious degree from
them again. Soon by their new electro-microscopes or clirolans they
were able to classify the infinitely minute foods of these infinitely
minute pasturers on the human tissue. Their microscopes, enormously
though they had added to the power of human vision into the atomic
world, had been unable to advance beyond the discovery and complete
classification of the invisible organisms. Their clirolans combined
photography with electro-microscopy in such a way that every change in
the systems of their minute foes was recorded; they were able to see
the elements taken from the human system absorbed and sifted of their
nutritive powers, and the débris or manure ejected and left to poison
the human tissues; it was not the presence of the organisms themselves,
or even their destruction of essential elements that generally produced
the disease, but the accumulation of the exhausted excreta, clogging
the various functions. At first medical science satisfied itself with
cultivating feeble and underbred germs, and turning them loose on the
human body in order to make them exhaust the elements which attracted
their kin. Next they discovered the chemical combination that,
introduced into the body, would neutralise the poisonous qualities of
the bacterial débris. Last of all by their vimolans or photo-electric
analysers they found the exact food which attracted each form of
microbe to the tissue and nourished them there; and they experimented
electro-chemically till they knew the element that, combining with this
bacterial food, would neutralise its attraction and yet leave the body
as efficient and healthy as before; in short, they could prescribe the
antidote to every disease that had ever enfeebled any portion of their
system. Diseases were nothing else than the infinitesimal life of space
fixing itself, after an eternity of detachment and attenuation, upon
a living soil fat with the elements of attraction and nourishment and
yet too feeble to hold out against its ravages. They drew an analogy
from their old agriculture; weeds were nothing but plants finding at
last the conditions which would give them the victory in the struggle
for existence and would enable them to grow so rapidly and luxuriantly
as to choke all neighbours; and their old science of earth culture set
them on the way to a true medical science. They had watched with their
clirolans the selective processes of the roots of each weed, and by
various analysers had found the combination of elements in the soil and
air by which it overcame its rivals; they then discovered the special
component which, uniting with its food, would deprive the weed of its
nutritive powers. Thus were they able to encourage or discourage on any
soil any growth they might select. But agriculture had been completely
superseded by their later chemistry. The best thing it had left to
their civilisation was the cue it gave by analogy to their true science
of therapeutics.
How minute and detailed was their study of the infinitesimal life of
the universe, I could not have imagined without having seen it in
practice. They had advanced so far with their clirolans and vimolans
that they were now discovering a still more infinitesimal world which
was parasitic on microscopic life. There had been elements and effects
at times discoverable in their therapeutic problems that disturbed the
certainty of their conclusions and solutions. Again and again their
foresights had been mistaken, their calculations thrown out. Most often
was this the case on the borderland of the moral world. They had known
in their own far past history, and in the more recent history of the
other islands of the archipelago, the demoralising effect of epidemics
and plagues, especially of a new and vigorous type. For a time the
people who came within the influence of the disease seemed to return
almost to savagery. And yet every plague differed slightly from every
other in its moral results. One made the whole population thieves;
another made them liars; a third stirred up a fury of lust; a fourth
delivered over the soul to despair of life, and a fifth to disloyalty
and intrigue. When once their attention was called to this widespread
demoralisation after an epidemic, they began to watch the effect of
individual illnesses on the mind; and in every case there were results,
emotional, moral, or intellectual, that were not to be accounted for
by mere weakness of the body or irritation of the nerves, or by the
poisonous débris that the minute organisms threw off.
They invented still more powerful clirolans, which revealed an
intensity of life they had not imagined. The disease germs brought into
the human system still more minute parasites that at once attacked the
brain and the nerve-centres. In one disease these invisible vermin
preferred one set of brain-cells, in another they preferred another.
The therapeutic families engaged in the investigations were only just
coming to classify these moral and intellectual parasites of the
disease germs. Nor had they yet been able to discover any cure for
these but the sympathetic proximity of strong and noble minds. The
look from the eyes of some of their greatest doctors, even the touch
of their hands, seemed to drive the living evil forth, or at least to
attenuate and enfeeble it. The mind of the patient rose triumphant in
the presence of one of these wise and healing personalities. It had
been for ages the traditional maxim of polity that only the loftiest
and most advanced, as well as most sympathetic natures should be
allowed to specialise for the medical castes, or marry into the medical
families. None were allowed to nurse the sick but the beautiful souls
of the community; their mere presence seemed to strengthen the fainting
heart in the struggle for life. As the mind grew strong, the ravages
of the disease lessened. For now with their more powerful clirolans
they found that, as the brain or nerve-centres acquired strength, the
parasitic, invisible life took its way back to its original hosts and
preyed on them. It was indeed one of the maxims of their community to
keep the system of every individual at its highest point of vitality.
A loss of exhilaration in any citizen was marked at once by his
neighbours, just like a lapse into criminality in Western civilisation.
It was the symptom of possible disease with all its power of contagion.
The sense of active vitalisation (what we call the spirits) was the
barometer of the sanitary, moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and
every Limanoran was keenly sensitive to all its changes.
In Oomalefa it was impossible to conceal the source of the
degeneration. The specialised families of the medical council knew
where to apply their investigatory instruments. Even with their own
eyes and ears and electric sense they could often detect the exact
nesting-place of the intrusive microbes; for though to my muddy senses
their bodies were as opaque as my own, except for a certain pellucid
light which illuminated the skin and made the complexion so beautiful,
the processes of life seemed an open book to their acute observation.
Their hearing could detect any change in the normal beat of the heart
and even the passage of the blood in the veins, which, Thyriel has
told me, sounded like the liquid rhythm of mountain-rills. Their
eyes could see through the skin the delicate veinings underneath and
detect every nervous or muscular effort. Their magnetic sense could
tell them whether thought or emotion was developing in the centres
or passing along the nerves. The very casing of the brain seemed to
them to be semi-transparent, and they were conscious, though dimly,
of the movements of even the finer tissues, non-existent to my senses
except under the microscope. Hence it was that each Limanoran had an
isolated dwelling-place for himself. It would have been impossible for
him to find rest or sleep close to the living and unresting functions
of another human system; and it was only the rhythm of the movements
and sounds of all the organs and processes which made proximity to
one another tolerable. I have often seen Thyriel in raptures over the
noble harmony of a healthy and virtuous personality; to her ear the
pulsations and other sounds were like a majestic piece of music; to
her eye the rush and hurry of the vital processes were not unlike the
motions of the starry system of night; whilst the exhilaration through
the electric sense from the speeding thoughts and emotions of a sound
mind in a sound body was at times ecstatic. The nobler the soul that
she was conscious of in her neighbour, the keener was her enjoyment of
proximity. It was this that made only the purest and greatest minds in
the healthiest bodies admissible to the medical families or council.
There was a curative power in their very presence.
With their clirolans and vimolans and other aids to the senses the
medical sages could detect the slightest jar in the rhythm of the
system and locate it with the greatest ease. Having located it, they
knew the parasite that had begun to multiply and clog the organ or
tissue or function, and the treatment that it required. Every moral
fault had its corresponding disease and infinitesimal parasite they
held; and so rapidly could the minute organisms increase and so
impalpably and easily could they migrate from human being to human
being that the contagion of vice was a thousand times more appalling
in its ravages than that of mere physical disease. There was great
trepidation when any ailment attacked the body of a Limanoran,
and he was heartily ashamed of its appearance and alarmed lest it
should spread, or lead to its natural consequence, moral degeneracy;
but, if the parasitic attack was found to be on one of the higher
centres of life, the alarm was great and wide, for it was far more
subtle in its insidiousness and omnipotence. The patient was at once
quarantined and only the noblest of medical sages could break his
isolation. All the powers of his mind and of the minds of his nurses
and medical attendants were concentrated on the offending tissue,
and strong thermoelectric aids were applied to it, so that it should
soon regain its old vitality and drive the intruders out. In the
chamber was kept up an atmosphere of the special elements which would
nourish the degenerate cells and also of those that would destroy
the microbes; only as a last resort was surgery used and the part
laid open to the local application of re-agents against the hostile
organisms. The ruder and older forms of evil--passion, envy, malice,
hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity--rarely appeared in grown men and
women at that advanced stage of their civilisation. They had become
diseases of the immature periods of life, when the soul was passing
through the primitive phases of the development of mankind. They were
the ailments of childhood and youth; and hundreds of the Limanorans
now grew up without once experiencing any one of them. When they did
appear, isolation was the first step; and the parents or proparents
could generally cope with the moral disease without having recourse to
a medical family or to Oomalefa. Every traditional method of cure was
applied most vigorously, for they shrank from the thought of leaving
any seed of the contagion in the system to germinate at some later and
more dangerous period of life.
When the home circle was unable to detect the exact character of the
disturbing influence, the young patient was brought under the gaze and
the tests of the medical families. If their clirolans and vimolans
failed to identify the parasitic evil, they tried their magnetometers,
which were so delicate as to indicate the first beginnings of mental
or moral disorder. By means of another magnetic instrument they were
able to extract portions of the microbic débris, and then with their
photo-electric analysers or vimolans they separated its various
elements and saw what moral evils had entered into the system. They
had the physical equivalents and results of every form of guilt and
crime, and thus in its very inception a moral taint could be detected
and cured before it had time to appear in the words or conduct
of the patient. Most often this taint was due to some ancestral
weakness of tissue inviting the swarms of parasitic microbes through
which the earth is for ever passing. On the first signs of lowering
vitality the pedigree of the patient was consulted for the record of
the retrogressive tendencies of his forefathers, and not till the
possibilities of atavism were exhausted were the other tests resorted
to.
It was on the basis of these two coincident causes, degeneration of
tissue and microbic life in the atmosphere, that they were able to
explain the strange contemporaneity of revolutions, panics, wars,
religious revivals, and widespread outbreaks of crime or immorality in
various parts of the earth. The planetary system as it sweeps through
space cannot help passing through vast oceans of living microscopic
matter which have drifted from other universes geological ages before
in their unresting migration from infinity to infinity, and which lead
a feeble death-in-life till they meet with fit atmospheres, such as
will make them strong and teeming. For new-born worlds, just ready for
the settlement of life upon them, this is a blessing; but for those
having upon them highly developed organised life it is too often a
curse. Every nation or tribe where civilisation has become enfeebled
by luxury or immoral systems of polity or domestic manners becomes the
prey of the new swarm, which multiplies and spreads itself on a fat
and unexhausted soil with the swiftness of a long unsated appetite.
The people rise in epidemic fury, and every institution suffers from
the madness. In different ages the frenzy takes different forms, but
there is a striking simultaneity in these outbreaks all over history;
and only this intrusion of cosmic infinitesimal life on the weakened
higher centres of the human system can explain it fully. None but the
peoples who have ordered their existence on the moral laws of the
universe and thus kept the tissues strong, solid, and unyielding can
resist the plague-like mania. The result of these epidemics was in the
end, they held, a benefit to humanity; for they swept away most of the
tainted life from the earth and left the healthier constitutions able
for another advance in intellectual power or in morality. The Limanoran
medicists were ever testing and analysing the atmosphere of the earth
for these intrusive emigrants from other worlds; vigorous and healthy
though their systems were, some chance minute stranger might find a
lodgment in them, and cause much derangement before he could be got rid
of. Ethics, psychology, history, and ethnology were as important to
their medical investigations as physiology, anatomy, and chemistry.
With all this extension of medicine into regions that seemed to me, a
man of Western civilisation, the most remote from it, there had been a
gradual contraction of the sphere of surgery. The hacking and hewing
of the human frame to get rid of some intrusive organism seemed to
them as barbarous as the butchering of animals for food. Brilliant
operations they thought the confession of failure in previsional and
preventive medicine. They would have considered it a disaster, if not
a crime, to let any disease proceed so far unobserved as to need the
excision of the part affected. Even when, by an accident, a bone was
fractured, they could light up the whole sphere of the accident and
see exactly how to get the sections or fragments to meet again. Then,
keeping the limb or organ at rest, they concentrated all the energy
of the patient’s body and mind and the curative influence of their
own presence upon it. They sent the nutritive powers of circulation
and nerve-energy into it by application of their various electric
instruments, some of which combined the effect of exercise and the
effect of heat. In a few days, sometimes in a few hours, the junction
was complete, and only rest and a medicated and nutritive atmosphere
were needed to make the tissue as sound as before.
One of their newest instruments and the most effective for the
avoidance of surgical operations was the alclirolan, a combination of
microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric power. It could by means of
a swiftly moving film, on which fell electric light through a vacuum,
take a picture of the life-processes within the living body, however
minute. Then by means of magnifiers and brilliant light they could
throw from this film a moving picture on a screen, so enormously
enlarging the process of any part of the body that even a novice could
see at a glance what was healthy and what was diseased or obstructed.
It was this alclirolan that made the study of physiology in the living
body simple enough for the very youngest. It was by this that they were
able to supplement the experimental hall at the entrance to Oomalefa,
and to show in process the effect in actual human bodies of disease,
microbes, and remedies. Every minute process of the various organs
and tissues of the body and of the brain was reproduced marvellously
magnified on the walls. There was no new medicine but was tested and
had its effects on the various parts of the body revealed by this new
method. There was no new disease or microbe but gave up its secrets to
this instrument.
The only surgery they had was creative, like all their other sciences
and arts. It had to do chiefly with the capacity of the skull. The
appearance of epilepsy in some of their ablest men and families ages
before had pointed the way. Their knowledge of the localities and
tissues of the brain, along with the semi-transparency of their skulls
and the advantages their alclirolan had introduced, gave them complete
command of everything that was proceeding within the head. They could
by their electric apparatus light up the tissues and see what part was
growing and pressing upon the containing bone. They therefore learned
to trephine the epileptic sufferers and thus relieve the oppressed
locality of the brain. From this practice and the growing knowledge
of the great purpose of life they passed into the stage of creative
surgery. For imperfect tissue perfect was substituted. Man-grafting
had become the most important branch of surgery. They could modify
and even create new faculty or organ or tissue by grafting what they
had made on to the part of the infantile system which needed it. A
child to be devoted to a special pursuit which needed some faculty
exceptionally developed had his skull enlarged in its early and plastic
stage over the portion of the brain that was the material equivalent
and instrument of the faculty; and when most of the energies of life
began to pour into his pursuit the tissue had room to grow. If a
combination of exceptional faculties were needed in any profession
or pursuit, protuberances in various parts under the hair or even
on the brow could be perceived on looking closely. So nice had this
creative art become that the most delicate and minute trephining
could be accomplished without the patient knowing much about it; the
operation was generally finished and the wound healed whilst he slept.
Their bodies had great recuperative powers, and the means applied were
wonderful in their rapidity of working. The hand of the operator, too,
manipulated the part under a huge microscope that magnified the tissues
ten thousand-fold. In fact they had all kinds of modifications of the
microscope that would fit even internal investigations; one reflected
the part in the manner of the reflecting telescope, and turned
microscopes of great power on the reflected image. They had surgical
modifications of their clirolans and vimolans so that they could
examine permanent moving pictures or analyses of the tissues to be
investigated. Nothing could escape their methods of finding out defects
in the human system. However deep the organ or tissue to be examined
might be in the body, it flashed out its forms and processes upon their
irelium sheets as they moved. By moving these photographic records
rapidly underneath their microscopes the physiological processes of
life could be reproduced and examined; stationary, each moment of
the processes could be slowly investigated. Their photo-electric
instruments could light up and make transparent any stratum of tissue
desired, whilst keeping the rest in shadow or dark outline.