When the home circle was unable to detect the exact character of the disturbing influence, the young patient was brought under the gaze and the tests of the medical families. If their clirolans and vimolans failed to identify the parasitic evil, they tried their magnetometers, which were so delicate as to indicate the first beginnings of mental or moral disorder. By means of another magnetic instrument they were able to extract portions of the microbic débris, and then with their photo-electric analysers or vimolans they separated its various elements and saw what moral evils had entered into the system. They had the physical equivalents and results of every form of guilt and crime, and thus in its very inception a moral taint could be detected and cured before it had time to appear in the words or conduct of the patient. Most often this taint was due to some ancestral weakness of tissue inviting the swarms of parasitic microbes through which the earth is for ever passing. On the first signs of lowering vitality the pedigree of the patient was consulted for the record of the retrogressive tendencies of his forefathers, and not till the possibilities of atavism were exhausted were the other tests resorted to. It was on the basis of these two coincident causes, degeneration of tissue and microbic life in the atmosphere, that they were able to explain the strange contemporaneity of revolutions, panics, wars, religious revivals, and widespread outbreaks of crime or immorality in various parts of the earth. The planetary system as it sweeps through space cannot help passing through vast oceans of living microscopic matter which have drifted from other universes geological ages before in their unresting migration from infinity to infinity, and which lead a feeble death-in-life till they meet with fit atmospheres, such as will make them strong and teeming. For new-born worlds, just ready for the settlement of life upon them, this is a blessing; but for those having upon them highly developed organised life it is too often a curse. Every nation or tribe where civilisation has become enfeebled by luxury or immoral systems of polity or domestic manners becomes the prey of the new swarm, which multiplies and spreads itself on a fat and unexhausted soil with the swiftness of a long unsated appetite. The people rise in epidemic fury, and every institution suffers from the madness. In different ages the frenzy takes different forms, but there is a striking simultaneity in these outbreaks all over history; and only this intrusion of cosmic infinitesimal life on the weakened higher centres of the human system can explain it fully. None but the peoples who have ordered their existence on the moral laws of the universe and thus kept the tissues strong, solid, and unyielding can resist the plague-like mania. The result of these epidemics was in the end, they held, a benefit to humanity; for they swept away most of the