The medical councillor knew that he had a keen critic in every citizen; and he had to justify and make clear every process he recommended, in order that faith in him might remain clear. His sole advantage was his fuller and deeper knowledge and the faculty he had acquired from long familiarity with the questions and problems he had to deal with. Each member of the medical families and council had a special section of the human system to explore, besides having a mastery of the whole. It was this division of labour that caused their science of the human tissues to advance so swiftly. Not a moment of their work was lost. I had thought at first that a people so healthy and vigorous and devoted to such wholesome ways of life had no need of medical science; but I soon saw that their general sanativeness demanded a more advanced science and art than the rude quackery of Western medicine. All the worst diseases of maturity in Europe, fevers, consumption, diphtheria, rheumatism, indigestion, and the rest, were relegated in Limanora to childhood, and were then as mild and innocuous as scarlatina or measles or whooping-cough; they had become the enemies of unformed tissues, and found little to batten upon even in them. Generally they were checked in their first stage by the medical knowledge of the parents or proparents, and it was the rarest occurrence to have to resort to the deeper knowledge of the medical council, rarest of all where childhood was concerned. I rushed to the conclusion that the medical families would have nothing to investigate but the development of the tissues and organs and faculties as they existed in Limanora; but I was disabused of this idea by the occurrence of an epidemic in the island not long after I arrived there. It took the form of dream-disturbed sleep, which held the faculties in its grasp beyond the usual number of hours of rest. The patients tossed and moaned and imagined horrors of the past of humanity and animalhood as still occurring in their lives. It abridged the hours of consciousness, and left the sufferers spent and unexhilarated. It was no fever, but only a languor that attacked the imaginative faculties and made them morbid and secretive in their activities. My brain-tissues were perhaps not fine enough to be attacked by it, and I escaped; but I was greatly distressed to find that Thyriel had been touched by the epidemic. My anxiety led me to know all that the specialists discovered concerning it. It could not be fatal, they assured me; for no epidemic had been fatal to Limanorans for many centuries. It only meant the loss of a valuable portion of the time of working. In the other islands, the winged scouts brought the news, it had swept half the populations into the grave; but so vigorous and healthy were the various tissues of our people that no disease could produce anything but a temporary derangement.