If, on the other hand, there was a break in the continuity, and only as an impersonal energy they passed forth into the interstellar spaces, then would there be the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous past which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and Limanoran past which they loved. Any being that has advanced much in its more recent stages must naturally try to forget the lower stages through which it has gone in a more distant past. They were by no means proud of their relationship to their exiles or to the still older and wider humanity existing outside of their archipelago. To remember it was to encourage the lower and less-advancing man in them. To forget it was one of the ethical duties which their progress demanded. It was only as a horror, as a possible hell into which they might fall, if they retrograded, that it was still brought before them. A race or nation that remains long proud of its past must be but imperceptibly progressive, if it is progressive at all. Its ethical point of view is stationary, its morals and religion are stagnant. The history of a people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if it does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the history of other races but a record of wars, of wholesale slaughters, because of the ambition of a man or a section of men? And as long as we are proud of such a past we can never advance. To have an ancestry nobler than ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to suggest such a thing to a man should be considered the grossest insult. Where a people is developing as it ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth, oblivion should be one of its foremost duties to all but its immediate past. Man has forgotten his bestial ancestry so effectually that when he comes across the manifest relics of the relationship in his system, he is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as rapidly as he ought to do, after there has been implanted in him the divine principle of reason, then would he as surely cast into oblivion his savage and semi-civilised ancestry. Out with the ape and all relics and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To be done with the crude undeveloped past is the duty of progressive men. The ideal of to-day should be the commonplace of to-morrow, and the disgrace of next week. It was useful to study the immediate past in order to get perspective for the present, and to decide on the rate of progress for the future. But it was becoming doubtful to this people whether they should perpetuate in the valley of memories so much of the past after it had faded into insignificance. They had come to think that to forget was as necessary to the advance of man as to remember, and that a universal rubbish-destructor for the now poverty-stricken achievements of their far past would one day become essential. As it was they still preserved records of them lest some historical question might grow to be of importance to their future.