“From the earliest times, as you know,” said he, speaking informally, and yet with something of the manner of a professor addressing his class, “We Atlanteans have been skilled in horticulture. To begin with, nature provided the stimulus, for the flora of an island such as Atlantis is apt to be unique, and that of our own country was particularly so. But long before the Submergence, we had outdone nature by developing a multitude of new plants; and since the Submergence our botanists have busied themselves incessantly with the study of artificial stimulation of vegetable life. It is well known how industriously they have experimented, trying the effect of new soils and environments, grafting the limbs of innumerable bushes and trees, cross-fertilizing and encouraging all favorable chance growths or ‘sports’; and in these pursuits they have been aided by the altered environment of Atlantis, which seems favorable to rapid and sudden variation, and has given rise to innumerable varieties of plants unknown before. “I do not need to tell you how essential all this has been for the maintenance of Atlantean life, for our land is limited in extent and much of it is unsuited for agriculture; only by the intensive and forced development of the rest can we hope to support our people. And so it has been necessary to evolve food-plants that would produce more prolifically than any known before; and at the same time we have had to develop a light which would be the chemical equivalent of sunlight, and so would stimulate the chlorophyl of the leaves, the original source of all organic matter. This, to be sure, was accomplished even before the Submergence; but since the Submergence there has been a constant improvement in the quality of the artificial sunlight; and in the eleventh century A. S., the great chemist, Sorandos, produced a light actually superior to sunlight. At least (for some reason that Sorandos himself never made sufficiently plain) it stimulates plant life to an extraordinarily rapid growth, even though it has the compensating fault of inducing rapid decay. It is this light which you see shining down upon you now from the great stone columns.” * * * * * The speaker paused, and I thought the time opportune to put a question which had been puzzling me. “You tell us that you have need for intensive crop production,” said I, “and yet have I not heard that you can produce food chemically?” “Yes, indeed,” admitted the tutor, with a shrug. “The same light that develops the chlorophyl in plants may be employed for the synthetic manufacture of starch and sugar out of charcoal and distilled water. But that is an old-fashioned method, and not very successful on the whole, for we have found that this artificial food lacks some element essential for good health.”