Nor was it ever forgotten that the ear and the sense of harmony had as much to do with the acceptance of a word as its fitness to express an idea. Harsh sounds wasted valuable tissue as much as unmeaning syllables. The verbal atrocities of Western science would have made the Limanorans shudder. Dissonance was an offence against the spirit of harmony which pervaded the cosmos; it was as easy to form a melodious word or phrase as one that was grating or stridulous. Euphony, it seemed to them, was one of the first essentials of a language; and it was much pleasanter to be silent than to talk unmusically. There had grown up an instinct in them that moulded their sentences into what Europeans would have called poems. The barest statement of fact ran with a liquid sweetness that drew the ear like a piece of beautiful music. The strictest scientific discourse sounded to me as majestic and melodious as some of the greatest passages in our Western poets. Their most ordinary conversation had the liquid harmony of our finest lyrics without the monotonous rhythm, the jingling rhyme, or the mincing gait. It never struck them that there should be a special art of words apart from that skill which all had by instinct whenever there was a thought to express. If it were a perfectly new thought, a discovery or invention that was still unnamed, then it was the duty of the whole people to make or approve of a word which would exactly fit it. Loose-fitting language soon meant loose, shambling thought, and it was one of their foremost responsibilities as a race to see that no one of them was driven into that. The appearance of a special literary art, for which some were specially gifted, would have told them at once that their language was disorganised and that the first great public need was its reform.