But I had seen only one department of Oolorefa, that which consummated the work of the rest. One branch of the sonarchitect families was specially charged with experimentation on the materials for building. Irelium was the general name for the metallic combination of elements best suited to the state of civilisation they had reached; but there were innumerable modifications and grades of it, and there were more being discovered every day. We entered one magnificent building, and there found a dozen or more workmen, each isolated in a transparent chamber and busy with some combination of irelium and one or other of the stellar metals. Every star or series of stars had its own predominant and characteristic element or amalgam of elements; and it was a main duty of one of the chemical families of the island to examine every star for its new element and to find something corresponding to it in terrene matter. This section of the people studied with the most anxious care the products and the results of the leomorans; they visited almost hourly the mouths of the lava wells and watched the spectroscopic recorders of the fumes that rose out of them; for they seldom failed to find at one time or another some constituent of the interior of the earth corresponding to any new stellar element or metal recently discovered. Whenever it was found in any leomoran a chamber for its deposition was constructed and the clirolan was specially adapted to the preservation of all of it that issued out of the bowels of the earth. These new metallic constituents were called by the name of the stars in which they predominated, and were at once put into the hands of the sonarchitect families to be tested for structural utilities. It was thus irelium had been discovered, and thus they hoped to find materials still more plastic to their purposes. Already they had so modified their new metal by amalgamation with other stellar metals that they had fitted it to functions no metal had served before; it could be made flexible or tough, light or heavy, transparent or opaque, malleable or brittle, soluble before heat or water or electricity, or resistent to any or all of them; it was difficult to say what quality they could not impart to it; and here I could see the workmen testing new combinations in order to find new qualities or new grades of a quality already found. I stood and watched one who was trying an amalgam of a new stellar metal called vanelium with gold; he had already attempted to combine it with iron, silver, copper, irelium, and found it in each case either impossible or useless; but the reactions had pointed him to gold as its natural ally; and now, having found the two combine with ease, he was exhausting the various possibilities of combination in different proportions, and after submitting the new amalgam to his tests, was recording the results. It gave a marvellous toughness and elasticity to gold, so