This organization of labour was not nearly so complicated a business as such a task would be if attempted on the earth, even if we were to assume that the average terrestrial character was as well-conditioned as that of the Hesperians. For it is plain that, under the Hesperian conditions of life, the number of separate callings and professions is comparatively small. A world where there are no children has no need for the vast machinery of education; the great army of schoolmasters, tutors, and professors is non-existent. The absence of death leaves no place for the undertaker and his ghastly satellites. There are no clergy, for there is no known God. Medical science is, as has been already noticed, in a very strange condition, or rather is non-existent. Dissection of the vital parts of the body being impossible, the physician is indebted to the analogy of the lower animals for his hypotheses as to the structure of the rational being. Fortunately, diseases are unknown. As for surgery, a singular revolution in its practice was an immediate result of the discovery of the real nature of evanescence. In the earlier ages, before the weariness of life had set in to any great extent, the occurrence of any grave bodily lesion, which, though not fatal, was sufficient to involve a serious mutilation, or the entire loss of organs of perception, was a calamity so great that the inhabitants of the earth, confined as they are to one short bodily life, would find it hard, even in imagination, to realize its severity. In spite of all precautions such accidents sometimes took place, and the unhappy sufferers, reluctant to surrender their whole existence, would often consent to undergo operations which had the effect of leaving them to abide for ever as helpless, mutilated trunks. So the Hesperian surgeons were skilful amputators of limbs, and they could, and often did, perform other serious operations for the purpose of preserving the patient from evanescence. Still their success was but small, for the wretched condition of the sufferer usually led to the extinction of his life under the metronomic law of Adverse Balance—evanescence, in fact, was only postponed. But, as the world-weariness gained ground, few were found who were willing to purchase life at so heavy a price. And finally, when the true nature of evanescence was understood, all operations except those of the most trifling character ceased at once. Whenever a serious accident takes place, an anæsthetic sufficiently powerful to destroy life is administered, and the patient awakes immediately, with his organism restored, at the South Pole.