We were now to begin the special study which was to make us useful working members of the community, filling our own places in it, and serving its great and final purpose with our own labour and thought. Many years would we have to spend in this secluded grove mastering the knowledge and achievements of this family. Its distinctive name was Leomo, which meant earth-seers, and its department was the study of the crust and inner movements of our orb. It was one of the peculiarities of all Limanoran science that it was art too; nothing was lost; every investigation or discovery or law had practical issue; and it was the duty of the investigator to find out how his work bore upon the progress of the race to its final aim. As I saw farther and got deeper into this study I discovered that much which had seemed purely speculative was most practical and relevant to the purpose of the race. A shallow view would have rejected nine tenths of it as useless application of the energies, as mere fancy thinking. The wider my knowledge, the more my admiration of the far-sight of these investigators grew. They seemed to me to have almost the gift of prophecy as they looked at the facts they accumulated and the conclusions they tried to draw. It was easy to follow them for every generation had reduced the ancestral writings and thoughts and achievements to the briefest available form, and indexed all that previous generations had done. It was the duty of every new student of a family, after he had finished his general education and seen the advances made in other branches, to bring all his ancestors’ researches and suggestions into relation to these, and to place a brief account of them on record in the latest phraseology and scientific light, so that any alien student might read or hear with understanding. There was thus in every family grove a summary of all that was known or achieved in its department of science or life. And this great graveyard was also the library of the race, so classified and summarised and indexed that any man could take a complete survey of its contents in a few years. There was the living index, too, available in every grove. Anything that was obscure could be at once explained by the representatives of the family. Besides these there were families whose duty it was to supervise the relationships of the various sciences and branches; they could point out to the investigators how far their work tended to overlap or interfere, what was futile in their efforts, what directions had still to be taken and what paths to be traversed. They permitted no piece of work to be wasted; everything was correlated by them to the purpose of the race and to its contemporary efforts. The boundary-lines of the various departments were defined and mapped by them. They were the organisers of research, the dividers and economisers of intellectual labour.