The storm-cone as a rule was enough for sanitation. By its wind force it could drift all dangerous clouds of moisture or of bacterial life past Limanora. By its electric-darting powers the heart could be squeezed out of storms before they struck the shores. It regulated the rainfall, depositing the contents of clouds by day far out upon the sea and by night upon the thirsting land. Sultry blacknesses that would otherwise float past with only stifling effect were tapped, first for their electricity and then for their rain. Storms of dust that now and again darkened over the circle of fog could be precipitated into the ocean partly by electricity, partly by the blasts of the storm-cone. The atmosphere was kept singularly pure and free from deleterious germs or particles, and few nights passed without a drenching shower cleansing the whole lower portion of the island. The peak of Lilaroma drew to it like a magnet all the masses of moisture that collected within many hundred miles of it; and a little manipulation would break these up into refreshing night showers that swept its slopes and the plateaux and levels below; and, in order to prevent the destructive floods that this might produce in the rivers, the shoulders of the mountain and its deep valleys bristled with great forests which sponged up the falling moisture and let it down gently from hour to hour into the bastioned channels. Climate was to this people as much a matter of management as food and its production. They could modify it to fit any change in the conditions or necessities or purposes of life. To be at the mercy of the forces of nature was a state of existence in what they now considered their barbarous past. It was only the unforeseen that had them at a disadvantage; and the unforeseen was to them now only the cosmic. As the planetary system shifted through space, it had to encounter conditions and modes and degrees of energy and life that nothing short of omniscience could anticipate; but they were beginning to master the secret of many of those unexpected changes of condition. The astro-sciential families had been classifying for centuries the symptoms that accompanied these in the appearance of the sun or of one or other of the planets. With their innumerable delicate instruments for recording and analysing the electric, magnetic, luminous, and heat-vaporous state of distant space, they could see afar off the beginnings of cosmic disturbances and anticipate their ultimate direction; and in many cases they could guard Limanora against the more patent and destructive effects of magnetic and electric storms and of great waves of heat or light.