And the Limanoran medical sages had taken advantage of this prophetic provision of nature. They systematically tested every fibre and cell of the brain of each individual they had to educate and develop, and without hesitation or error found out every possibility of his nature. They tested and tabulated the results of every electric stimulus and every dream that followed it, and by this means had a complete natural history of all his ancestral past. No revolution could happen in the state of any Limanoran, nothing of what we mean by conversion. It has sometimes been said in the science of the West that there are two brains or physical organs of soul in every man, and this explains the strange actions and reactions, conversions and recoils that so often occur in life. But it is far truer that there are a hundred brains in every man, and that his brain is composed of elements out of all his ancestry, even his far-back animal ancestry; and it all depends on the stimulus which of those brains or ancestral brain-elements will come uppermost. The Limanorans had millions of sun pictures of their own exiles and of the various peoples of the rest of the world in innumerable attitudes and situations, and with expressions on their faces unconsciously worn; and they could point out in each the predominating animal. In going over the memories of the men and women I had known I could recall times when the look of some animal had come out strongly on their faces. I had had, to my misfortune, much acquaintance with the serpent nature, the most predominant in an unwisely progressive civilisation like that of Western Europe where convention and custom and law become the opportunity and the mask of characters fallen far into the rear of progress. When laggard natures are not monasticised and prevented from breeding, a progressive people get overrun with hypocrisy; under convention and custom and law they take shelter and there is no power that can drive them out; the finer phases of civilisation, industry, art, learning, speculation, morality, religion, become their nesting-ground. At last the serpent nature is accepted as the type, provided there is not too fatal a sting in it. The religious legends mirror this serpent-like development. The serpent is the spirit of evil which caused their degeneration from the godlike. The serpent they see everywhere, even when it has disappeared from their own land. Their greatest successes in any sphere are by means of serpent-like subtlety, whilst they still profess to worship the ideal of truth and candour abandoned by them in the far past. In practice it is the qualities of the serpent they embody and develop; in theory they worship its foe and conqueror.