functions; and the moment of the final collapse was practically within their own choice, as soon as they had the consciousness of the whole community with them. Here stood two solid memorials to the working of this prescient or devitalising power. The beauty of expression on the two faces was very striking. The attitudes were as natural and noble as life itself, that of Amiralno bidding his partner farewell, hers full of loving petition to follow. That the whole people approved was clear in the heartiness with which they broke into the song of liberation. Everyone was glad that the energies of these two, who had done their full duty by the race, were free to enter other spheres, and follow other than the terrene methods of advance. Reverently, but still with great rejoicing, the family of the departed placed the two lifelike statues in the car of victory, and guided it in triumphal flight to the valley of memories. Then the people as reverently and joyously bent their way to the duties they had left. I stood in a day-dream of the strange but noble ways of life that this people followed, and suddenly awakened to find myself alone on the hill of farewells overlooking the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had witnessed welled back into my heart; I had not yet got rid of the old attitude of Western civilisation towards death. With the sorrow mingled still the old curiosity; questions sprang into my mind concerning the significance of the ceremony I had seen; or was it a ceremony? I was startled with the answer in the negative. It came from Thyriel, who, knowing my doubts, had remained to solve them. Soon I knew the whole meaning of the scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The dulness of my own inner senses had prevented me from knowing the common impulse of the race towards Doomalona. As soon as Amiralno had finally resolved to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the island, and stirred the people at their duties to common action. They knew that the hill of farewells would be the scene of the departure, and in bands singing the cosmic music of farewell they made their flight through the air to give a last valediction to the voyager into the unknown and to impart to him in his final effort on earth all the magnetic power they could spare for him on his journey. Every act of what I had thought was a ceremonial was the natural and spontaneous impulse of a people united in spirit. Their music and the changes in it were due to no leader or signal, but to the sympathetic inspiration of the moment. Their creational chant was an assertion of their mood of belief that this scene was one of advance, and not of retrogression, of development and not of decay, that the act was as much an act of cosmic life as the creation of a world. Certain portions of the system were about to become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily and material,