The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the fancy. They looked as if doomsday were near, and were often heard to say that something must be done. For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its train,--vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of reason. The torrent of eloquence was spreading wider every day and seemed to have broken down the pales of their long centuries of civilisation. No one was capable of stopping it either by precept or example. At last in their despair the elders appealed to the medicants. Nothing like the phenomenon had occurred within the memory of the oldest; nothing in the records could be found that in the least resembled it since the series of exilings had been completed. At the periodical inspection, the medicants made a more minute investigation of the systems of the youth and turned their attention especially to the left side of the brain, which is the great originator and controller of speech. In a few they could see evidences of inflammation and morbid secretion in the brain-tissue of this region; in most cases nothing out of the common revealed itself to their most recent lavolans. So they took careful electrographs of the left side of the brain of most of them, and when they put these under their strongest clirolans, it became plain that all of them were in a diseased condition. The elders were now convinced that they were on the right track of investigation, and all the young people who had shown symptoms of the passion for eloquence were isolated and brought hourly under the inspection of the medicants. Moving electrographs of the thought-processes in the diseased parts were taken daily by means of modifications of the lavolan; and under still more powerful clirolans, made for the purpose, these revealed a microbe of extraordinary minuteness at work in the tissue. Having found the source of the mischief, they set themselves to remove it. At first they put the patient into profound sleep, and, trephining the skull, they cleansed away under the clirolan all traces of the parasite and its débris. What they removed they carefully preserved and analysed; then, having found the chemical elements of the mischievous spawn and their débris, they reproduced the mixture as a cure of the new and singular disease. For a time this was administered as an internal medicine; but finding that it injured other nerve-centres besides those that they intended to affect, they resolved to apply it only locally, and soon learned how to avoid the necessity of trephining the skull. They invented an electric syringe and injector, which caused the mixture to penetrate through the skull into the part of the brain affected, thus sterilising the tissues that had to do with speech and making them unattractive as a feeding-ground for the microbe of loquacity.