The Floramo were the forerunners of the Sidramo or chemical families, and experimented in materials and juices and essences, which would be useful to the race in its ever-quickening advance. Often would vegetal nature reveal a compound that shortened some route through the future, and the Sidramo would then analyse the product, and find the secret of its special efficiency. The Floramo were indefatigable in that department of their work which experimented with the application of plants and their fruits and tissues to useful purposes, and every day saw some process accelerated by the results of their labours. In fact they classified the vegetal world not merely according to the structure and methods of growth and propagation, but mainly according to the particular utility of the products. The one classification was more essential to their creation of new species, the other to their discovery of purposes for which new species might be created. Like all their sciences, botany was nothing if it was not creative. Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the Floramo gave a new bent to it, applying their energies to strengthening its vitality and its vitalising powers, and to finding out the most convenient form in which to use its treasured energy. Aided by the Sidramo they were able to combine the juice of the fruits of the floronal and the germabell with the paste of the nut of alfarene into minute, to my eyes almost microscopic, globules, each of which would support one of their couriers in the ether outside of our atmosphere for several hours. At first they lost one of the vitalising elements in securing another; and even after they had been able to bind the three essences together in one form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes when they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after experimenting for many months, they were able to concentrate these essences under enormous pressure and by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would not volatilise except in the saliva of the mouth and under electric stimulus. They were also able to give their globules such electric power as would utilise the streams of magnetic energy that filled the ether. Thus the ether-couriers found them far more strengthening and sustaining just above the earth’s atmosphere than in it. One globule lasted several hours longer in a vacuum, and made breathing and the other vital functions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to them by this discovery a long vista of investigation. The new type of sustenance and oxygenation was so concentrated that the couriers into the sky could carry with them enough to serve through months.