Limanora the island of progress
more dangerous period of life.
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
tainted life from the earth and left the healthier constitutions able
for another advance in intellectual power or in morality. The Limanoran
medicists were ever testing and analysing the atmosphere of the earth
for these intrusive emigrants from other worlds; vigorous and healthy
though their systems were, some chance minute stranger might find a
lodgment in them, and cause much derangement before he could be got rid
of. Ethics, psychology, history, and ethnology were as important to
their medical investigations as physiology, anatomy, and chemistry.
With all this extension of medicine into regions that seemed to me, a
man of Western civilisation, the most remote from it, there had been a
gradual contraction of the sphere of surgery. The hacking and hewing
of the human frame to get rid of some intrusive organism seemed to
them as barbarous as the butchering of animals for food. Brilliant
operations they thought the confession of failure in previsional and
preventive medicine. They would have considered it a disaster, if not
a crime, to let any disease proceed so far unobserved as to need the
excision of the part affected. Even when, by an accident, a bone was
fractured, they could light up the whole sphere of the accident and
see exactly how to get the sections or fragments to meet again. Then,
keeping the limb or organ at rest, they concentrated all the energy
of the patient’s body and mind and the curative influence of their
own presence upon it. They sent the nutritive powers of circulation
and nerve-energy into it by application of their various electric
instruments, some of which combined the effect of exercise and the
effect of heat. In a few days, sometimes in a few hours, the junction
was complete, and only rest and a medicated and nutritive atmosphere
were needed to make the tissue as sound as before.
One of their newest instruments and the most effective for the
avoidance of surgical operations was the alclirolan, a combination of
microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric power. It could by means of
a swiftly moving film, on which fell electric light through a vacuum,
take a picture of the life-processes within the living body, however
minute. Then by means of magnifiers and brilliant light they could
throw from this film a moving picture on a screen, so enormously
enlarging the process of any part of the body that even a novice could
see at a glance what was healthy and what was diseased or obstructed.
It was this alclirolan that made the study of physiology in the living
body simple enough for the very youngest. It was by this that they were
able to supplement the experimental hall at the entrance to Oomalefa,
and to show in process the effect in actual human bodies of disease,
microbes, and remedies. Every minute process of the various organs
and tissues of the body and of the brain was reproduced marvellously
magnified on the walls. There was no new medicine but was tested and
had its effects on the various parts of the body revealed by this new
method. There was no new disease or microbe but gave up its secrets to
this instrument.
The only surgery they had was creative, like all their other sciences
and arts. It had to do chiefly with the capacity of the skull. The
appearance of epilepsy in some of their ablest men and families ages
before had pointed the way. Their knowledge of the localities and
tissues of the brain, along with the semi-transparency of their skulls
and the advantages their alclirolan had introduced, gave them complete
command of everything that was proceeding within the head. They could
by their electric apparatus light up the tissues and see what part was
growing and pressing upon the containing bone. They therefore learned
to trephine the epileptic sufferers and thus relieve the oppressed
locality of the brain. From this practice and the growing knowledge
of the great purpose of life they passed into the stage of creative
surgery. For imperfect tissue perfect was substituted. Man-grafting
had become the most important branch of surgery. They could modify
and even create new faculty or organ or tissue by grafting what they
had made on to the part of the infantile system which needed it. A
child to be devoted to a special pursuit which needed some faculty
exceptionally developed had his skull enlarged in its early and plastic
stage over the portion of the brain that was the material equivalent
and instrument of the faculty; and when most of the energies of life
began to pour into his pursuit the tissue had room to grow. If a
combination of exceptional faculties were needed in any profession
or pursuit, protuberances in various parts under the hair or even
on the brow could be perceived on looking closely. So nice had this
creative art become that the most delicate and minute trephining
could be accomplished without the patient knowing much about it; the
operation was generally finished and the wound healed whilst he slept.
Their bodies had great recuperative powers, and the means applied were
wonderful in their rapidity of working. The hand of the operator, too,
manipulated the part under a huge microscope that magnified the tissues
ten thousand-fold. In fact they had all kinds of modifications of the
microscope that would fit even internal investigations; one reflected
the part in the manner of the reflecting telescope, and turned
microscopes of great power on the reflected image. They had surgical
modifications of their clirolans and vimolans so that they could
examine permanent moving pictures or analyses of the tissues to be
investigated. Nothing could escape their methods of finding out defects
in the human system. However deep the organ or tissue to be examined
might be in the body, it flashed out its forms and processes upon their
irelium sheets as they moved. By moving these photographic records
rapidly underneath their microscopes the physiological processes of
life could be reproduced and examined; stationary, each moment of
the processes could be slowly investigated. Their photo-electric
instruments could light up and make transparent any stratum of tissue
desired, whilst keeping the rest in shadow or dark outline.
CHAPTER X
THE FIRLA, OR ELECTRIC SENSE
THEIR physiology had no longer any need of anatomy or vivisection as
its foundation and starting-point. Besides the alclirolans, they had
their mirlans or life-lamps, as they called them; and these enabled
them to watch any process of the human body and see how it changed
under the treatment they applied. These life-lamps appealed not only
to their eyes and ears, but to their electric sense. They isolated the
magnetic force as well as the sounds and appearance of any section
of tissue, and took graphic and permanent record of it, as they did
of the changes in form or texture or sound. Every kind of tissue in
any organ or limb had its normal magnetic equivalent measured in
terms of the personal equation of force and beat of the heart. The
slightest deviation from this at any time of the day or month would
at once challenge attention and lead to microscopic investigation.
They enlarged the electrograph, the phonograph, and the photograph of
the point indicated and were thus able to examine under the sarifolan
every infinitesimal atom of it in all the aspects which appealed to
their sight, hearing, and electric sense. Their sarifolan magnified
and interpreted for these investigative senses the graphic record of
their mirlans, as the microscope magnifies for the sight. I could see
and hear the movements and processes in the tissue, but the electric
effect was to me as general as a shock from a galvanic battery; I
could not detect anything definite or measurable. But the Limanorans,
though they had something of our diffusion of electric sense, had also
in the back of their necks a localised sense that responded to the
faintest magnetic influence and measured roughly its amount and its
changes in kind and degree. The delicate nerve-centre there, which
might have been the remains of a backward-looking eye, had developed
with them into a most sensitive collector of electric vibration in the
air or in any section of matter; and in every atom, whether organic
or inorganic, they declared there was ever some electric wave motion;
in some it was too faint to affect their firla or electric sense, but
then their delicate instruments for magnifying it, like their mirlans,
made it manifest to their senses and definable. It was to my general
feeling of magnetism what the muscular sense in my fingers was to my
diffused sense of touch. It had taken many generations to develop, and
in their children it never appeared till they had reached the close
of youth; but part of their education was directed towards making it