Invention and discovery struck out with unprecedented energy, and the ethical and emotional phase of imagination grew at a marvellous pace; new ideal realms were opened out for morality and practical thought. The experience threw a remarkable light upon a phenomenon which had puzzled them for generations. After the period of youth the members of the community had to specialise; and for some undiscoverable reason those who devoted themselves to mathematics and the working of abstruse formulæ had been found, able though most of them were, to be the most rigidly unreasonable in the community; they refused to admit that they could be mistaken in any of their judgments or even opinions; nothing would move them,--neither logical argument nor emotional appeal; they assumed that they had found absolute truth, and refused to have compromise. In one generation in the far past the mathematical families had to be exiled, so serious an obstruction had they become to progress. Again they had been completely renewed, children of the most noble-minded, freest, and most imaginative families being substituted for the old members, and trained to fulfil their functions; within a generation the result was the same; these scions of the finest of the race became as narrow-minded and obstructive as their predecessors had been. It seemed to be useless to change the stock, and for some generations the community accepted their conservatism and obstinacy as inevitable; they grew accustomed to smiling at the mathematical families as “the omniscients.” Why the true cause of this degeneracy had not occurred to such a shrewd and logical people it is hard to say; probably because they were so wedded by long tradition and practice to the idea that mathematics was one of the loftiest of sciences and one of the most essential elements in education. They doubtless refused to reconsider its claims or to abandon their inherited reverence for it. But the discovery of the effect of the calculative habit on the tissues of the brain at last forced them to face the true cause of the infallibility of the mathematical families. It was their occupation that caused their degeneracy. Men began to pity them for the slavery in which they had been so long held and to devise means for their liberating. The old habitual smile at the mention of their name became sadness at the thought of what these members of the race might have accomplished for its civilisation had they not been so frozen in their tissues by the perpetual use of formulæ. They were amazed at their own dulness in failing to see that men who dealt in such mechanical methods and exact results could not but be mechanical themselves and easily fall into the fixed mental attitude of the omniscient, and dealing with a world so unreal in its stiff, skeleton-like outlines could not but fail in a world of conditions and compromises.