THESE halls of nutrition and medication were situated on a great promontory extending miles into the sea. It had been ledged and bastioned with lava walls, and round the gleaming edifice ran a balcony or rocky platform, which broke the fury of any ambitious billows that might threaten the crystal translucence of the walls. Here, overlooking the sea, the Limanorans could drink in its medicating breath; here in the vast hall could they take that restful exercise which is the first essential of all life; here they could commune with their own souls or with the stars and listen to the ever-changing rhythm of the waves as they broke into spray or climbed to the rocky wall beneath. They considered this chamber of the ocean and the stars as more medicant and alimentary than any they could make with human hands; hence it was that they had thrown out this great projection into the sea, where they could spend most of their hours of nutrition.
Along its highest ridge ran a series of the noblest buildings that ever met my eye, unlike all other edifices I had ever heard of in style of architecture and method of grouping, but resembling in their bewildering variety and inherent symmetry the gleaming clusters of night. Countless points of fire aimed at the heavens from spires and towers which shone with rainbow fluctuation in the sun. There was a milky way of jewelled pinnacles; and around were strewn fire-flashing constellations of jewel minarets and domes. Innumerable centres of varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by their incompleteness to some great centre; and soon it rested calmly on the vast yet ever-broken and changing dome that like a snow-clad mountain-ridge mastered every spirit that was drawn to it. Alone this galaxy of clustered starry forms stood out above the sea, undwarfed by any neighbouring land and masterful over the billows below it. A true temple was it even in the presence of the universe of suns that stretched out into endless night. Within it surely might the spirit of man feel no unholy doubts of its immortal destiny or of its kinship with the divine. Pure and noble orison might here be raised to the Maker of the makers of this shrine; all trivial and mean thoughts would here be sacrilege. When night fell, the stars in the heavens held spirit communion with this their brother. This was Oomalefa, or the jewel of immortal longings.
My first visit to Oomalefa is engraved upon the record of my past, for it was one of my first expeditions under the guidance of Thyriel. The beauty of her spirit dawned upon me as the day passed; afterwards I came to see that it was everything that my own needed, but at the time I could not reason out the nature of my feelings. She grew upon me as the day upon the night, and when we parted it was as if my sun had set; helpless and stumbling, my spirit groped for the guiding dawn again; I was forlorn, reaching out for my other half in a lonely universe.
Her presence doubtless coloured all the scenes through which I passed, yet they were enough of themselves to impress my mind. We alighted on the mainland and made our way out towards the archway which spanned the root of the promontory. The weight of our bodies as we stood upon a certain spot swung up the transparent portcullis, and we found ourselves in a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving orrery of the sky of night, its walls lit pictures of the ocean around framed in living sections of the sea alive with sea-denizens, its floor a tidal beach of sand, soft yet firm, whereon the sea ever seemed to cream and retreat. It had all the beauty and the freshness of the shore beneath the starred night when the tide is making.
The next chamber we entered was as vast, and was as many-coloured as the rainbow. It was the index hall; for here were marked the name and number and situation of every chamber in Oomalefa, and underneath each name was shown in graphic experiment the effect of the different medicated atmospheres upon the various tissues of the human body. Complete reproductions of the bones and muscles, the flesh and blood, the cells and nerves and coatings were here enclosed and the transformations pictured in the transparent sections of the walls. An expert from the family having the manufacture of each atmosphere under its charge stood by and guided and explained the process. It was a physiological laboratory, in which every Limanoran might see with his own eyes and hear explained by one who knew, every modification in the tissues that a longer or shorter time spent in any chamber would produce.
Twin with this hall was that of measurement and consultation. Here every entrant had all his important organs and tissues tested scientifically, and was then told the atmospheres which would best suit the development of any or all of his parts and faculties. He stated the chief purpose of his existence, and consulted the experts on the directions that would best lead to it. He was told of any defect in his organic functions and advised how it could be remedied. After this consultation he could return to the hall of experiment and see with his own eyes the effect of the various atmospheres upon the unseen portions of his system. Then he was permitted to enter the halls of nutrition and medication, and choosing those which he specially needed that day spent the time required in each. He found exit again by the hall of measurement, and there another testing revealed whether he had been successful in his alimentary sojourn in Oomalefa, and whether he would have to remain longer or have a certain atmosphere introduced into his sleeping-chamber in his own mansion.
Every Limanoran except the young and undeveloped had as the result of attention to health in past ages what they called the conscience of the health. This put them on the alert the moment any function was disordered, and off they went to Oomalefa to consult the medical families on the exact nature of the derangement, its locality, and the diet or treatment that would restore to complete health. Few or none of full maturity but would feel this sanitary sense within them like a whip or goad which would not let them rest till the evil element was swept out. It was a daily occurrence to meet some islander hurrying post-haste for consultation and medication, and I came at last to be ashamed of the lethargy which would let me remain inert under some decay of nerve or tissue in its primary stages until it had resulted in ache or pain. The feeling of lassitude or the absence of the sense of the full tide of life made me rush in fear and trembling to the hall of consultation. In my former existence I had had the embryo of this sanitary conscience in the pains or prostration accompanying disease, but then the warning generally came too late. Now I was sensitive to the slightest derangement of any tissue or part of my system and without the goad of ache flew to Oomalefa to find the remedy; otherwise I felt that I was doing wrong to my future and my posterity and to the future of the whole race. Even the actual present of the people was affected; the slightest disorder of my constitution seemed to weigh upon the spirits of my companions and friends, for they believed there was contagion in every disease. As strongly did they hold that there was a contagion of health, and would not allow any member of their medical families or council to approach a citizen even in consultation unless the healer was himself whole in every atom of his constitution. To be sound in body and spirit was as sanative of the derangements of others as any active remedy.
Every citizen was taught enough of the medical science of the island to know what was wrong in himself or his neighbour; for every citizen was a possible father or mother; and for parenthood a thorough and practical acquaintance with the laws of health and the causes and cures of the commonest diseases was a first essential. The Limanorans laughed at the absurdity of Western civilisation in allowing men and women to generate and bring up children with no more knowledge of their constitution than if they were mere animals. Still oftener they mourned that so much human generation in the world was left to the chance dictates of caprice, and that most medicine and education were only blind groping in the dark. That nothing should be done on mere authority was one of the first principles of their civilisation.
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.
By means of their skilful surgery they soon isolated under the microscope some specimens of the living organisms that produced the disease; they experimented with all the elements and their combinations and saw what encouraged them, what attenuated them, and what killed them. It was not long before every trace of the microscopic creature had vanished from the island; there remained only the knowledge and the antidote that would enable their outposts or messengers through the sky to resist its attacks, should they ever encounter it again. Limanorans who were sent on missions out of the country had to be made epidemic-proof by inoculation against known diseases before setting out. But it sometimes happened, especially to scouts into the higher regions on the outskirts of the earth’s atmosphere, that they brought back with them symptoms that were new, and a new disease and a new microbe had to be added to their medical lists. It was explained to me that our solar system was travelling every moment of its existence into new regions of space; and as it moved it passed from time to time through swarms of minute and attenuated life which had been left myriads of ages before in its tracks by some diseased member of another system. This microscopic life was in its own special way immortal, and could subsist on the scattered material life that floated though the ether unclaimed by any planetary centre. It was out of such waifs of life peopling space that a new world made a new beginning in vital history; as soon as it cooled down sufficiently, after creative collision and separation, to allow of individual existence upon it, myriads of these microscopic inhabitants of space took possession of it, and began again the struggle of life which was the universal law of infinity, and meant the ascension of all energy through higher and higher circles.
Disease was but a form of this eternal struggle for existence; it was the attempt of invisible lower forms to master the higher human tissues and make them their feeding-ground. The original enemies of man, the wild beasts, were subdued or tamed or driven forth into the deserts as soon as savage life was passed. Then began the fiercer contest for the possession of his own cells and tissues and organs. Enemies that he could not see migrated out of the surrounding elements into his system as soon as it became delicate enough to stir their appetite, and for ages there were no weapons against them; chance now and again offered one; but generally he groped about in his frantic ignorance for anything that would ease the pain from these gnawing foes within him. Out of this rose by slow steps a kind of quackery they called the science of medicine; but the conflict still remained unequal; the invisible enemies had the best of it, and they were ever being recruited by new enemies out of space, which bred new and more appalling plagues. Not till it was found that the newer these settlers were the more virulent were their ravages was there any chance of a real science of medicine arising from this everlasting agonism.
The first beginnings of a true science appeared in the attempts to deplete the soil by setting tamed and exhausted specimens of their foes to feed on it. A soil once reft of the elements that invited and fitted any disease germs seldom suffered in any serious degree from them again. Soon by their new electro-microscopes or clirolans they were able to classify the infinitely minute foods of these infinitely minute pasturers on the human tissue. Their microscopes, enormously though they had added to the power of human vision into the atomic world, had been unable to advance beyond the discovery and complete classification of the invisible organisms. Their clirolans combined photography with electro-microscopy in such a way that every change in the systems of their minute foes was recorded; they were able to see the elements taken from the human system absorbed and sifted of their nutritive powers, and the débris or manure ejected and left to poison the human tissues; it was not the presence of the organisms themselves, or even their destruction of essential elements that generally produced the disease, but the accumulation of the exhausted excreta, clogging the various functions. At first medical science satisfied itself with cultivating feeble and underbred germs, and turning them loose on the human body in order to make them exhaust the elements which attracted their kin. Next they discovered the chemical combination that, introduced into the body, would neutralise the poisonous qualities of the bacterial débris. Last of all by their vimolans or photo-electric analysers they found the exact food which attracted each form of microbe to the tissue and nourished them there; and they experimented electro-chemically till they knew the element that, combining with this bacterial food, would neutralise its attraction and yet leave the body as efficient and healthy as before; in short, they could prescribe the antidote to every disease that had ever enfeebled any portion of their system. Diseases were nothing else than the infinitesimal life of space fixing itself, after an eternity of detachment and attenuation, upon a living soil fat with the elements of attraction and nourishment and yet too feeble to hold out against its ravages. They drew an analogy from their old agriculture; weeds were nothing but plants finding at last the conditions which would give them the victory in the struggle for existence and would enable them to grow so rapidly and luxuriantly as to choke all neighbours; and their old science of earth culture set them on the way to a true medical science. They had watched with their clirolans the selective processes of the roots of each weed, and by various analysers had found the combination of elements in the soil and air by which it overcame its rivals; they then discovered the special component which, uniting with its food, would deprive the weed of its nutritive powers. Thus were they able to encourage or discourage on any soil any growth they might select. But agriculture had been completely superseded by their later chemistry. The best thing it had left to their civilisation was the cue it gave by analogy to their true science of therapeutics.
How minute and detailed was their study of the infinitesimal life of the universe, I could not have imagined without having seen it in practice. They had advanced so far with their clirolans and vimolans that they were now discovering a still more infinitesimal world which was parasitic on microscopic life. There had been elements and effects at times discoverable in their therapeutic problems that disturbed the certainty of their conclusions and solutions. Again and again their foresights had been mistaken, their calculations thrown out. Most often was this the case on the borderland of the moral world. They had known in their own far past history, and in the more recent history of the other islands of the archipelago, the demoralising effect of epidemics and plagues, especially of a new and vigorous type. For a time the people who came within the influence of the disease seemed to return almost to savagery. And yet every plague differed slightly from every other in its moral results. One made the whole population thieves; another made them liars; a third stirred up a fury of lust; a fourth delivered over the soul to despair of life, and a fifth to disloyalty and intrigue. When once their attention was called to this widespread demoralisation after an epidemic, they began to watch the effect of individual illnesses on the mind; and in every case there were results, emotional, moral, or intellectual, that were not to be accounted for by mere weakness of the body or irritation of the nerves, or by the poisonous débris that the minute organisms threw off.
They invented still more powerful clirolans, which revealed an intensity of life they had not imagined. The disease germs brought into the human system still more minute parasites that at once attacked the brain and the nerve-centres. In one disease these invisible vermin preferred one set of brain-cells, in another they preferred another. The therapeutic families engaged in the investigations were only just coming to classify these moral and intellectual parasites of the disease germs. Nor had they yet been able to discover any cure for these but the sympathetic proximity of strong and noble minds. The look from the eyes of some of their greatest doctors, even the touch of their hands, seemed to drive the living evil forth, or at least to attenuate and enfeeble it. The mind of the patient rose triumphant in the presence of one of these wise and healing personalities. It had been for ages the traditional maxim of polity that only the loftiest and most advanced, as well as most sympathetic natures should be allowed to specialise for the medical castes, or marry into the medical families. None were allowed to nurse the sick but the beautiful souls of the community; their mere presence seemed to strengthen the fainting heart in the struggle for life. As the mind grew strong, the ravages of the disease lessened. For now with their more powerful clirolans they found that, as the brain or nerve-centres acquired strength, the parasitic, invisible life took its way back to its original hosts and preyed on them. It was indeed one of the maxims of their community to keep the system of every individual at its highest point of vitality. A loss of exhilaration in any citizen was marked at once by his neighbours, just like a lapse into criminality in Western civilisation. It was the symptom of possible disease with all its power of contagion. The sense of active vitalisation (what we call the spirits) was the barometer of the sanitary, moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and every Limanoran was keenly sensitive to all its changes.
In Oomalefa it was impossible to conceal the source of the degeneration. The specialised families of the medical council knew where to apply their investigatory instruments. Even with their own eyes and ears and electric sense they could often detect the exact nesting-place of the intrusive microbes; for though to my muddy senses their bodies were as opaque as my own, except for a certain pellucid light which illuminated the skin and made the complexion so beautiful, the processes of life seemed an open book to their acute observation. Their hearing could detect any change in the normal beat of the heart and even the passage of the blood in the veins, which, Thyriel has told me, sounded like the liquid rhythm of mountain-rills. Their eyes could see through the skin the delicate veinings underneath and detect every nervous or muscular effort. Their magnetic sense could tell them whether thought or emotion was developing in the centres or passing along the nerves. The very casing of the brain seemed to them to be semi-transparent, and they were conscious, though dimly, of the movements of even the finer tissues, non-existent to my senses except under the microscope. Hence it was that each Limanoran had an isolated dwelling-place for himself. It would have been impossible for him to find rest or sleep close to the living and unresting functions of another human system; and it was only the rhythm of the movements and sounds of all the organs and processes which made proximity to one another tolerable. I have often seen Thyriel in raptures over the noble harmony of a healthy and virtuous personality; to her ear the pulsations and other sounds were like a majestic piece of music; to her eye the rush and hurry of the vital processes were not unlike the motions of the starry system of night; whilst the exhilaration through the electric sense from the speeding thoughts and emotions of a sound mind in a sound body was at times ecstatic. The nobler the soul that she was conscious of in her neighbour, the keener was her enjoyment of proximity. It was this that made only the purest and greatest minds in the healthiest bodies admissible to the medical families or council. There was a curative power in their very presence.
With their clirolans and vimolans and other aids to the senses the medical sages could detect the slightest jar in the rhythm of the system and locate it with the greatest ease. Having located it, they knew the parasite that had begun to multiply and clog the organ or tissue or function, and the treatment that it required. Every moral fault had its corresponding disease and infinitesimal parasite they held; and so rapidly could the minute organisms increase and so impalpably and easily could they migrate from human being to human being that the contagion of vice was a thousand times more appalling in its ravages than that of mere physical disease. There was great trepidation when any ailment attacked the body of a Limanoran, and he was heartily ashamed of its appearance and alarmed lest it should spread, or lead to its natural consequence, moral degeneracy; but, if the parasitic attack was found to be on one of the higher centres of life, the alarm was great and wide, for it was far more subtle in its insidiousness and omnipotence. The patient was at once quarantined and only the noblest of medical sages could break his isolation. All the powers of his mind and of the minds of his nurses and medical attendants were concentrated on the offending tissue, and strong thermoelectric aids were applied to it, so that it should soon regain its old vitality and drive the intruders out. In the chamber was kept up an atmosphere of the special elements which would nourish the degenerate cells and also of those that would destroy the microbes; only as a last resort was surgery used and the part laid open to the local application of re-agents against the hostile organisms. The ruder and older forms of evil--passion, envy, malice, hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity--rarely appeared in grown men and women at that advanced stage of their civilisation. They had become diseases of the immature periods of life, when the soul was passing through the primitive phases of the development of mankind. They were the ailments of childhood and youth; and hundreds of the Limanorans now grew up without once experiencing any one of them. When they did appear, isolation was the first step; and the parents or proparents could generally cope with the moral disease without having recourse to a medical family or to Oomalefa. Every traditional method of cure was applied most vigorously, for they shrank from the thought of leaving any seed of the contagion in the system to germinate at some later and 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.
