Yet there was nothing personal or emotional in our studies. For years they were chiefly historical, watching the growth of earth-science through the generations, seeing the share that each member had in its development. How little they knew of it even up to the time of the exilings! The earliest ancestors groped amongst barren facts and their classifications. They named the rocks and the elements of the rocks, and speculated on the order of their formation; they told the story of the growth of glaciers in the original Antarctic land from which their ancestors had migrated, and tried to explain the origin and development of the strange archipelago in which they lived. But they saw no practical application of the resulting theories: even when they knew the stratum and its trend, they often failed in their directions as to where certain minerals would be found in it. Still the strides made by the family both in the knowledge and its application were marvellous, since the island had been purified and the true purpose of their civilisation was known. An instrument that I had grown accustomed to during the previous or general stage of my education enabled me now to see at a glance the improvements of each age or generation. It was the ammerlin, which might be translated historoscope. It focussed for the eye and ear any periods of the past. The whole pageant of some section of the history of any man, science, or object could be flashed stereoscopically in a few minutes on a dark surface, whilst all the sounds that accompanied the scenes would be reproduced in any required pitch and tone. It was one of the duties of the students and representatives to take numberless sun pictures and sound pictures of all the important scenes in the life of the family and in the development of their science and art and instruments. In order to reproduce any scene, the two long strips of irelium that contained the series of momentary pictures of it were made to rotate as swiftly as they had rotated when receiving the impressions, and the sun pictures being transparent, light and magnifying glasses threw them life-size on a wall opposite the spectator; the lightning movement produced the full effect of action in life; and, as all the tints of the scene had also been impressed on the strips, there was nothing wanting to produce the illusion of life but the voices and the sounds. These, too, had been taken on an irelium strip and this, when placed in a voice instrument, added all that was needed to make the whole scene live. It was the duty of the students in each generation to single out the most striking and representative series and have them ready mounted in the instruments, that any new scholar might in a few days take a bird’s-eye view of the whole development of the family. Thus was I enabled to sit and study the past as if I had been a contemporary and eye-witness of it. The very music that accompanied and harmonised each