The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the recent imaginative productions that I became acquainted with. Thyriel and I joined a party of youth who, under the guidance of our proparents, were to listen to it, as it sounded through the linasan in the valley of Loomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious periods, as they echoed up the slopes; at brief intervals on the rocky curtain at the head of the gorge there would flame out for several minutes a moving picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of on the stage; and a still more striking illustration of the text of the book was a magnetic communication to our minds of the originating impulse which moulded each thought and scene in the imagination of the author, and the creative enthusiasm he felt as each idea burst in all its light upon his soul. By the time we had finished the book we knew its whole conception and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon the civilisation. It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my scepticism. The whole object of their unending labours was to take command of nature by finding out her secrets and abridging her processes, so as to make them serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had been my objections; for where would this people have been, if they had left nature to herself? What else was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that the more cruel animal part of her became dominant? Nature included an infinite range of gradations of energy and life from what we call dead matter to the subtle and elevated organisations that fill space and evade the finest perception of our senses. Within our own systems are to be found many of those, from the débris of our bodily tissues and organs to the noblest thought we can conceive; the precept to let nature alone is fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult to see which would have dominance, for it is easier to level down than to level up. Every interference with the lower nature in order to bring it under the sway of the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a whole by our creative thought, is a step upwards in the scale of existences. Three fourths of the process of human propagation belonged to the sphere of our lower nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed to speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse if they did freely speak of it. Every act seemed to drag them back again to the level of the animals, and it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts and traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people painfully fought their way up out of the slough of passion, and mastered the emotions that tended to overbalance them by their excess, and to plunge them back again into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds of precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever tried to do, its necessary recurrence never failed to embrute the nature for a moment,