TREMOLAN--Electric clock indicating the changes of electricity in various parts of the island. TREVAMOLAN--Graduated modifier of sound. VAMOLAN--Makro-mikrakoust. VIMOLAN--Photo-electric analyser. CHAPTER I DISCOVERIES WHAT I rejoiced over most of all was the growth of my sympathetic magnetism. Not merely was my firla or electric sense developing more satisfactorily; but I was becoming rapidly conscious of the impulses of the race. I no longer walked amongst this refined people like a blind man amongst men who see. I began to feel the enthusiasms that stirred them as a body, like a wind across a cornfield. I seemed to know whatsoever of public concern was occurring without having it directly communicated to me. I remembered in the buried life of my boyhood and youth, the lightning-spread of a new impulse through an assembly or a crowd; the most rational members of the mass were unable to resist it, even though it might be irrational or vile. How like a tornado the war-impulse bursts through a nation is one of the commonest observations in the study of history; statesmen and kings and heroes have to bow before it, and are swept along with it in spite of their better judgments. And as swift and widespread is the coward-impulse that sends a defeated people cowering to their homes. It is this unspoken magnetism, giving vent as it too often does to the evil in the human heart, that makes the cause of progress in even civilised races so hopeless. Through its all-leavening power success inspires and often consecrates the diabolic, and failure damns the noblest and most divine. And this it was that made progress so easy amongst the Limanorans; it became the instrument of the highest elements and thoughts in them. The whole weight of their humanity was on the side of advance, and it was to the better future that they ever gravitated. Everything that made for a higher plane was an inspiration to this people. This personal magnetism had been developed in them into a definite faculty of their souls. They had recognised for many ages the close affinity of mass-inspiration and the power of the individual will. It was the same energy working along the nerves, and even, though with some dissipation, through the space intervening between individualities. They had investigated its nature, conditions, and methods of action in their exact scientific way, and had identified it, as far at least as its form of energy was concerned, with electricity. It was even less dependent on material contact than that universal force. As they developed it in their frames, they were able to send more and more definite impulses through considerable distances. This was their filammu or will-telegraph, one of their most remarkable faculties, drawn with deliberate purpose by the elders of the race out of the chaos of mere vague influence and tendency.