historical study; for, as our Western commonplace goes, history repeats itself; and however new and ameliorative an age may be, it may obtain lessons, and still more warnings, from ages past. Their literature was all of the future. There were two of the largest families of the race devoted to it, and their numbers were ever being recruited by adoption into them of scions of others, who revealed exceptional imaginative faculty. They had the generalised training of the island; but their particular training was more completely specialised than that of any other family. Nothing was omitted that would tend to make them of imagination all compact, or to give them such ease in their command of language as would bring them the exact word without effort. Next to these points in their education stood tutelage in all that pertained to scenic art and music. For they had to give their ideas a staging that would at once appeal to the imagination of the whole people. Loomiefa was in their province. And the literary form into which they were to put their communications as to the future had to be as perfect as it could be in their language, exactly expressing all they had to convey, and at the same time appealing to the ear by its melody and harmony. As far as histrionic art was allowable in the island they were the artists, whilst in the linguistic conventions of the people they were the leaders and suggesters in the making of words, and in the choice of words made. They had, I could see, the finest heads in the community; the brow was broad, full, and shapely; the eyes were large and yet deeply set under the brows; the base of the skull was of great width; every section of the brain that had to do with imaginative and poetic power was well developed. Yet their faces and features showed no difference from the common Limanoran type; they had no more beauty or regularity of outline. It was clear that all children of a certain shape of skull and development of brain were selected for training and adoption by these two families, whenever they needed recruits.