Until these came a new danger to the health of Limanora threatened. A few days after the tornado, the precipitated organisms began to rise to the surface of the water and underneath the hot sun to form breeding-grounds for the dangerous microbes of the air. Up against the bastions of rock beat the stench of the living death. A plague threatened for a brief time; but they were not a people to remain passive in presence of such a danger, even though they could easily prevent its worst results by remedial measures. They sank the dead organic masses again by means of a charge of electricity, and then the deeper currents that brushed their shores swept the corruption into the great valleys of the ocean-bed, there to be embalmed for geological ages hence. They regretted that they should be the instruments of this great waste of life before it had fulfilled the purpose of its stage of development; but their regret was tempered by the thought that it was a low and feeble stage, that an infinity of such existence would not weigh in the balance with one day’s advance of a single Limanoran, and that the energy set free by this wholesale dissolution of organisms was still ready for other embodiments in the universe. The worst effect they feared was upon their own natures; to destroy life or deal with it frivolously was one of the worst offences against their humanity, for it introduced into the mind a brutalising element. Respect for life in all its forms was one of the truest tests of a civilisation, they held.