Limanora the island of progress
and logical people it is hard to say; probably because they were so
wedded by long tradition and practice to the idea that mathematics
was one of the loftiest of sciences and one of the most essential
elements in education. They doubtless refused to reconsider its claims
or to abandon their inherited reverence for it. But the discovery
of the effect of the calculative habit on the tissues of the brain
at last forced them to face the true cause of the infallibility of
the mathematical families. It was their occupation that caused their
degeneracy. Men began to pity them for the slavery in which they had
been so long held and to devise means for their liberating. The old
habitual smile at the mention of their name became sadness at the
thought of what these members of the race might have accomplished for
its civilisation had they not been so frozen in their tissues by the
perpetual use of formulæ. They were amazed at their own dulness in
failing to see that men who dealt in such mechanical methods and exact
results could not but be mechanical themselves and easily fall into
the fixed mental attitude of the omniscient, and dealing with a world
so unreal in its stiff, skeleton-like outlines could not but fail in a
world of conditions and compromises.
At first the prevailing idea was that all the studies and sciences
needing exactitude of formulæ and result should be neglected by the
community. On consideration it was felt that some of the most valuable
stepping-stones to the loftier ideals of the future would be sacrificed
if this were done. The other alternative was chosen. The inventors
who had made the calculating machines were set on to find instruments
which would accomplish what the mathematicians had had to do for the
community. And, one after the other, the years had produced them. Even
differential and integral calculus had been superseded by a series of
machines that with little guidance worked out all the applications
of their intricate formulæ to the sciences. As we advanced from
department to department we watched these machines at work confirming
the imaginative results of the physicists, the chemists, and the
astronomers. The mathematical families were relieved of their duties
and distributed, and every member of the scientific families was taught
to use all these formulating instruments. Their brain-energy was not
monopolised by calculations; the use of the machines was but a routine
detail in their wider intellectual life, and absorbed so little of
their energy that it seemed to have no effect on their faculties.
I was not many days in mastering the details of the formula-machines;
for I had paid some attention to mathematics in my buried life and the
memory of the subject rapidly revived. I soon came to see the wisdom of
the Limanorans in eliminating the study from their scheme of education.
It would have been the height of extravagance to waste long periods
of their lives in studying and doing what a machine could do better.
It was exactly the kind of work best done by a machine, for it had to
do with a world rid of all conditions and, mathematically speaking,
perfect. The inventors were still busy making new and simpler machines
for the use of the scientists; and, though they had to know the new
mathematical formulæ needed, they busied their brains rather with their
practical application and with the machinery that would use them. It
was imagination in the practice of mechanics rather than the mechanical
use of methods and formulæ that they were engaged on. Hence it was
that they avoided the old unpracticality of the mathematical families,
and stood in no danger of thinking themselves infallible and the only
treasuries of absolute truth.
One of the most interesting departments of Minella, as this great
building was called, was that which contained the measurers of time.
I was somewhat surprised that this department should exist, for I had
admired every day the power the Limanorans had of telling to a minute
fraction the passage of time. Their sense of time seemed to me to make
watches and clocks superfluous. Even when the sky was clouded over
and no heavenly body or light to be perceived, they could tell the
exact fraction of the day or night that had passed, as I tested again
and again by the watch I had brought with me. Their knowledge of the
natural signs of the time of day or year had become instinctive and
automatic through long centuries of daily use. The position and state
of the petals of flowers would at any moment by day or night, by shine
or cloud, reveal to them the time. So would the temperature of anything
they touched, or, if it were highly contractile, its size. But these
external signs were quite unnecessary. They had not to go beyond the
sensations of their own bodies to tell the time or season. They knew
by the intensity of the magnetism in them, by the acuteness of their
senses, by the amount of energy they could command.
But their experiments needed far more exactness than even their senses
could afford. Time had to be counted in their science not by mere
seconds, but by the hundred-thousandth, or even the millionth, part of
a second. One old-fashioned measurer of time was based on the length of
a wave of sound as it passed through a vessel of water. The length of
the vessel contained a round number of moltas (their smallest measure
of length, perhaps about the millionth part of an inch); the vibration
in the water reflected a bright light through a microscope and camera
combined; and a photograph of the pulsations imprinted itself on a
strip of irelium that kept moving with lightning swiftness across
the focus; this strip was divided into minute sections, each of them
corresponding to a lenta or millionth part of a second and numbered in
order up to a million. A newer clock had its principle based on the
length of a wave of light in a vacuum. Another and more convenient
clock, or rather watch, consisted of an electric battery that kept a
light irelium tongue vibrating; this latter controlled a graduated
mechanism which pointed out on a face the exact lenta in the time of
day that it was. It was small enough to be carried about on the person
like a watch.
A similar microscopic minuteness of division appeared in all their
weights and measures. They could weigh in their balances down to the
million-millionth part of an ounce. So with their measurement of heat
and cold; their thermometers could test ten thousand times the range
of temperature that their senses could bear, although their power of
endurance of fire and frost was to me something miraculous; their
furnaces were able to volatilise the most refractory of metals and
earths; they could reproduce the conditions of the most glowing suns,
and also the temperature of the coldest interstellar space, which, age
by age, they were bringing their frames gradually to bear with the
aid of certain foods and combinations of elements. Thus did they hope
in some future age to subsist, even when they ventured outside of the
atmosphere of the earth.
All their measures were based on the decimal system, the fundamental
unit for microscopic measurements being the amount of energy in an
atom of one of their elements, and that for cosmic measurements the
energy that would bring a beam of light from the sun’s surface to
the earth’s. They were able to see at a glance the exact amount of
energy in any phenomenon, to whatever sense it might appeal, and in
their minds there was ever a common measure for all types of force.
Their electrometers and magnetometers told not merely the amount of
electricity or magnetism in any machine, material, or phenomenon, but
the motive-power it would have when applied to any purpose. They could
compare at a glance, without any elaborate calculations, the advantages
to be obtained from any substance when using it as a force, whether
through the electricity or the heat or the gravitational power to be
obtained from it.
Especially useful was this common measure in dealing with the power
of light as separate from that of heat. It was of great importance to
them to know the exact amount of energy even in a beam of light which
their eyes could not perceive. For they used sunshine as one of their
great curative agencies, and the medical families were constantly
experimenting on the effect of more or less light upon the microscopic
life existing in and around the human body. One of their own new
developments had been the consciousness of light all over their skin;
they could tell with eyes shut whether it was the light of sun, stars,
or moon, or an artificial light which was falling on any part of their
body; the effect, even on the mind, differed completely in the four;
the sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave exhilaration or
even joy; the starshine brought contemplative melancholy; the moonbeam
mildly stirred the passions; whilst artificial light varied in its
power of exhausting brain and nerve energy with the material or element
that produced it.
Sunlight deprived of the intensity of its heat was to them one of the
essentials of life. Its bactericidal power had been scientifically
proved ages before, and a family had been set apart for testing its
effects both qualitatively and quantitatively. It was not merely a
loose knowledge that they had acquired of the antiseptic influence of
sunshine. They had measured exactly its power of depriving microbes
of their deadliness in the case of every disease; and they knew to a
nicety how strong or weak it would be needed in order to check their
ravages in any constitution, whether concentrated on a spot or diluted
and spread as in a bath, how long daily its application would be
required, and how many days. It was this family that superintended the
sunbaths in their halls of medication, and assisted the medical sages
in advising as to their use. It was true that daylight, and especially
that of a sunny day, swept one third of the noxious life out of all
water open to its influence, whilst the rays of the sun bleached most
bacteria of their pestiferous tendency. Yet used indiscriminately
sunshine became itself unwholesome, because of the other forms of
energy besides light that it brought with it from the sun and the
intervening spaces. If not used with caution, it would destroy the
microscopic allies of human life in the body, rendering feeble the
phagocytes that devour the virulent microbes; it would by its great
heat injure the delicate tissues of the brain, and by its magnetism
and weight press heavily on the nerves and the circulation. It was the
duty of the solometric family to rid it of its unwholesome elements,
and to indicate the exact amount and use of it that would be beneficial
in every state of the body. Another of the duties of this family was
to cultivate colonies of microbes of the various diseases and make
them harmless by means of sunlight for use in inoculations against
their own unmodified bacterial kin. One of their greatest aids in this
process was the use of the water of the sea; wherever it did not kill
the bacteria completely, it emphasised the bleaching power of sunlight
over them and rendered them the allies of the human system in its
struggle against all disease and decay. This sterilisation of disease
was one of the most important functions of the family. It was they
who led the flight-gambols of the Limanorans into the outer fringe of
the atmosphere, where they might drink in the elixir of unadulterated
sunshine; their guidance and contrivances were needed even there, in
order to prevent the action of the other energies in the light growing
deleterious. Even moonlight and starshine had their uses in the hands
of this skilled family. They could separate the deadly or poisonous