From the first the youth of these two families were educated in the sciences of the day in order that they might know what gaps in knowledge had to be filled, and what laws should guide and limit their imaginative prospecting. For the literature they produce is science in embryo. Science lays the foundations of literature, and literature prepares the way for science. These families by their imaginative productions based on all that is already known pioneer the scientific investigators into the new regions of the future. They keep in touch with the leaders of science, and act as allies to them, finding out the track of what these are trying to discover or invent, and suggesting methods of supplying their wants or reaching their aims. They provide working hypotheses for the scientists to apply and test and they map out roads for the whole race into the darkness of the unknown or the twilight of the half-conjectured. Thus their literature is fiction; for tentative fiction, they hold, is the only unstagnant truth. The productions of the pioneering families have all to be submitted to the national test. What the race disapproves of is promptly cancelled and forgotten. What meets with the approval of the elders or of the leaders of any one of the sciences is handed over to them for experimentation, even though it should not attract the rest of the people. What strikes the fancy of the nation as a whole is adopted as the map and guide of the future; it is the sacred book of the time, and the citizens study it daily for the purpose of reaching the goal it sets before their life. But every new age antiquates one or more of these sacred books. For the region they have mapped out in the future is reached and travelled over, the advance they anticipate is made, the ideal they paint is realised and rapidly becoming commonplace. It puzzled me for a time to guess what they did with their superseded books, knowing as I did how superfluous they counted all researches into the past and all imaginative pictures of the present. My question as usual was not long unanswered. I was shown the library of antiquated fiction in the valley of memories. It was used in the very earliest stages of education. The children read the books or heard them in order to see, when they reached years of maturity, what the race had come from and how much it might yet advance, to gather enthusiasm from the spectacle of the progress made, and to learn lessons for their own future. Beyond childhood and early youth every minute was counted lost that was not spent on the future and its possibilities; and for a man or woman of mature years all forms of antiquarianism were counted idleness.