“There was no need to distrust his assertions for we all felt how genuine he had become; and even sick and unconscious as you were, our magnetic sense told us that his description of you was correct. But it has become the custom to test scientifically the nature of every inhabitant of our island every week, and also at every crisis in his nature or in the history of the community, in order that any incipient defect may be at once remedied, and that drastic applications may never be needed. A complete survey of your character and faculties and corporeal system was the first step towards your admission into the community. Everything had to be known, in order that your education should be mapped out. And the cerebrometers gave us a favourable report of you. Your body and your working faculties are far in the rear of ours; you lack transparency of tissue, ethereality of motion; the material side of you is earthy and ponderous. These elements of retrogression we shall never be able to eject wholly from your system; but we shall be able to modify them, and in your children and your children’s children the body will keep pace with the spirit. The forwardness of your emotions, of your soul, is what has drawn us to you; you love the ideal and imaginative more than any but one section of our community; and you have an intermixture of the finer spiritual elements such as we have either lost or never had amongst us. We hope to graft your nature upon one of the divisions or castes of our race and so produce in the next generation a variety that we need. Your retention has thus been justified by the highest morality of our civilisation. We never take any step without reference to the ultimate aims of our progress: so to improve the breed that our posterity may feel nearer to the highest life in the universe. “Your education has indeed already begun. We have assumed from your highly disciplined and progressive spirit that you would be willing to submit to those medical methods that shorten the already abbreviative process of education. It is true that these make an enormous drain upon the physical strength for a time; and we prefer the ordinary spiritual methods of training. But you have gained from the open-air employments in which you have passed your life great stores of bodily health and vigour. You are still but a child. The period of childhood and tutelage extends with us to the thirtieth, sometimes to the fiftieth, year, that of youth to beyond the hundredth. At the time that other men are preparing to die the natural death of old age, we are just beginning to feel what it is to live.