You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.
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destroy, throughout a distance almost indefinite; at least I put it modestly
when I say from 500 to 600 miles. And their mathematical science as
applied to such purpose is so nicely accurate, that on the report of some
observer in an air-boat, any member of the vril department can estimate
unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles, the height to which the
projectile instrument should be raised, and the extent to which it should be
charged, so as to reduce to ashes within a space of time too short for me to
venture to specify it, a capital twice as vast as London.
Certainly these Ana are wonderful mathematicians- wonderful for the
adaptation of the inventive faculty to practical uses. 71 I went with my
host and his daughter Zee over the great public museum, which occupies a
wing in the College of Sages, and in which are hoarded, as curious
specimens of the ignorant and blundering experiments of ancient times,
many contrivances on which we pride ourselves as recent achievements.
In one department, carelessly thrown aside as obsolete lumber, are tubes
for destroying life by metallic balls and an inflammable powder, on the
principle of our cannons and catapults, and even still more murderous than
our latest improvements.
My host spoke of these with a smile of contempt, such as an artillery
officer might bestow on the bows and arrows of the Chinese. In another
department there were models of vehicles and vessels worked by steam,
and of an air-balloon which might have been constructed by Montgolfier.
“Such,” said Zee, with an air of meditative wisdom- “such were the feeble
triflings with nature of our savage forefathers, ere they had even a
glimmering perception of the properties of vril!”
This young Gy was a magnificent specimen of the muscular force to
which the females of her country attain. Her features were beautiful, like
those of all her race: never in the upper world have I seen a face so grand
and so faultless, but her devotion to the severer studies had given to her
countenance an expression of abstract thought which rendered it
somewhat stern when in repose; and such a sternness became formidable
when observed in connection with her ample shoulders and lofty stature.
She was tall even for a Gy, and I saw her lift up a cannon as easily as I
could lift a pocket-pistol. Zee inspired me with a profound terror- a
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terror which increased when we came into a department of the museum
appropriated to models of contrivances worked by the agency of vril; for
here, merely by a certain play of her vril staff, she herself standing at a
distance, she put into movement large and weighty substances. She
seemed to endow them with intelligence, and to make them 72comprehend
and obey her command. She set complicated pieces of machinery into
movement, arrested the movement or continued it, until, within an
incredibly short time, various kinds of raw material were reproduced as
symmetrical works of art, complete and perfect. Whatever effect
mesmerism or electro-biology produces over the nerves and muscles of
animated objects, this young Gy produced by the motions of her slender
rod over the springs and wheels of lifeless mechanism.
When I mentioned to my companions my astonishment at this
influence over inanimate matter- while owning that, in our world, I had
witnessed phenomena which showed that over certain living organisations
certain other living organisations could establish an influence genuine in
itself, but often exaggerated by credulity or craft- Zee, who was more
interested in such subjects than her father, bade me stretch forth my hand,
and then, placing it beside her own, she called my attention to certain
distinctions of type and character. In the first place, the thumb of the Gy
(and, as I afterwards noticed, of all that race, male or female) was much
larger, at once longer and more massive, than is found with our species
above ground. There is almost, in this, as great a difference as there is
between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla. Secondly, the palm is
proportionally thicker than ours- the texture of the skin infinitely finer and
softer- its average warmth is greater. More remarkable than all this, is a
visible nerve, perceptible under the skin, which starts from the wrist
skirting the ball of the thumb, and branching, fork-like, at the roots of the
fore and middle fingers. “With your slight formation of thumb,” said the
philosophical young Gy, “and with the absence of the nerve which you
find more or less developed in the hands of our race, you can never
achieve other than imperfect and feeble power over the agency of vril; but
so far as the nerve is concerned, that is not found in the hands of our
earliest progenitors, nor in those of the ruder tribes without the pale of the
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Vril-ya. It has been slowly developed 73in the course of generations,
commencing in the early achievements, and increasing with the
continuous exercise, of the vril power; therefore, in the course of one or
two thousand years, such a nerve may possibly be engendered in those
higher beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount
science through which is attained command over all the subtler forces of
nature permeated by vril. But when you talk of matter as something in
itself inert and motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left
you so ignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and
inert: every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by
agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril the most
subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most powerful. So that, in fact,
the current launched by my hand and guided by my will does but render
quicker and more potent the action which is eternally at work upon every
particle of matter, however inert and stubborn it may seem. If a heap of
metal be not capable of originating a thought of its own, yet, through its
internal susceptibility to movement, it obtains the power to receive the
thought of the intellectual agent at work on it; by which, when conveyed
with a sufficient force of the vril power, it is as much compelled to obey as
if it were displaced by a visible bodily force. It is animated for the time
being by the soul thus infused into it, so that one may almost say that it
lives and reasons. Without this we could not make our automata supply
the place of servants.
I was too much in awe of the thews and the learning of the young Gy
to hazard the risk of arguing with her. I had read somewhere in my
schoolboy days that a wise man, disputing with a Roman Emperor,
suddenly drew in his horns; and when the emperor asked him whether he
had nothing further to say on his side of the question, replied, “Nay,
Caesar, there is no arguing against a reasoner who commands ten legions.”
74 Though I had a secret persuasion that, whatever the real effects of vril
upon matter, Mr. Faraday could have proved her a very shallow
philosopher as to its extent or its causes, I had no doubt that Zee could
have brained all the Fellows of the Royal Society, one after the other, with
a blow of her fist. Every sensible man knows that it is useless to argue
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with any ordinary female upon matters he comprehends; but to argue with
a Gy seven feet high upon the mysteries of vril,- as well argue in a desert,
and with a simoon!
Amid the various departments to which the vast building of the
College of Sages was appropriated, that which interested me most was
devoted to the archaeology of the Vril-ya, and comprised a very ancient
collection of portraits. In these the pigments and groundwork employed
were of so durable a nature that even pictures said to be executed at dates
as remote as those in the earliest annals of the Chinese, retained much
freshness of colour. In examining this collection, two things especially
struck me:- first, that the pictures said to be between 6000 and 7000 years
old were of a much higher degree of art than any produced within the last
3000 or 4000 years; and, second, that the portraits within the former
period much more resembled our own upper world and European types of
countenance. Some of them, indeed reminded me of the Italian heads
which look out from the canvases of Titian- speaking of ambition or craft,
of care or of grief, with furrows in which the passions have passed with
iron ploughshare. These were the countenances of men who had lived in
struggle and conflict before the discovery of the latent forces of vril had
changed the character of society- men who had fought with each other for
power or fame as we in the upper world fight.
The type of face began to evince a marked change about a thousand
years after the vril revolution, becoming then, with each generation, more
serene, and in that serenity more 75terribly distinct from the faces of
labouring and sinful men; while in proportion as the beauty and the
grandeur of the countenance itself became more fully developed, the art of
the painter became more tame and monotonous.
But the greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three portraits
belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition,
taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as
much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh or a
Greek Prometheus.
>From this mysterious personage, at once a sage and a hero, all the
principal sections of the Vril-ya race pretend to trace a common origin.
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The portraits are of the philosopher himself, of his grandfather, and
great-grandfather. They are all at full length. The philosopher is attired
in a long tunic which seems to form a loose suit of scaly armour, borrowed,
perhaps, from some fish or reptile, but the feet and hands are exposed: the
digits in both are wonderfully long, and webbed. He has little or no
perceptible throat, and a low receding forehead, not at all the ideal of a
sage’s. He has bright brown prominent eyes, a very wide mouth and high
cheekbones, and a muddy complexion. According to tradition, this
philosopher had lived to a patriarchal age, extending over many centuries,
and he remembered distinctly in middle life his grandfather as surviving,
and in childhood his great-grandfather; the portrait of the first he had taken,
or caused to be taken, while yet alive- that of the latter was taken from his
effigies in mummy. The portrait of his grandfather had the features and
aspect of the philosopher, only much more exaggerated: he was not
dressed, and the colour of his body was singular; the breast and stomach
yellow, the shoulders and legs of a dull bronze hue: the great-grandfather
was a magnificent specimen of the Batrachian genus, a Giant Frog, ‘pur et
simple.’
Among the pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the
philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and 76sententious
brevity, this is notably recorded: “Humble yourselves, my descendants; the
father of your race was a ‘twat’ (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants,
for it was the same Divine Thought which created your father that
develops itself in exalting you.”
Aph-Lin told me this fable while I gazed on the three Batrachian
portraits. I said in reply: “You make a jest of my supposed ignorance and
credulity as an uneducated Tish, but though these horrible daubs may be of
great antiquity, and were intended, perhaps, for some rude caracature, I
presume that none of your race even in the less enlightened ages, ever
believed that the great-grandson of a Frog became a sententious
philosopher; or that any section, I will not say of the lofty Vril-ya, but of
the meanest varieties of the human race, had its origin in a Tadpole.”
“Pardon me,” answered Aph-Lin: “in what we call the Wrangling or
Philosophical Period of History, which was at its height about seven
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thousand years ago, there was a very distinguished naturalist, who proved
to the satisfaction of numerous disciples such analogical and anatomical
agreements in structure between an An and a Frog, as to show that out of
the one must have developed the other. They had some diseases in
common; they were both subject to the same parasitical worms in the
intestines; and, strange to say, the An has, in his structure, a swimming-
bladder, no longer of any use to him, but which is a rudiment that clearly
proves his descent from a Frog. Nor is there any argument against this
theory to be found in the relative difference of size, for there are still
existent in our world Frogs of a size and stature not inferior to our own,
and many thousand years ago they appear to have been still larger.”
“I understand that,” said I, “because Frogs this enormous are,
according to our eminent geologists, who perhaps saw them in dreams,
said to have been distinguished inhabitants of the upper world before the
Deluge; and such Frogs are exactly the creatures likely to have flourished
in the lakes and morasses of your subterranean regions. But pray,
proceed.” 77 “In the Wrangling Period of History, whatever one sage
asserted another sage was sure to contradict. In fact, it was a maxim in
that age, that the human reason could only be sustained aloft by being
tossed to and fro in the perpetual motion of contradiction; and therefore
another sect of philosophers maintained the doctrine that the An was not
the descendant of the Frog, but that the Frog was clearly the improved
development of the An. The shape of the Frog, taken generally, was
much more symmetrical than that of the An; beside the beautiful
conformation of its lower limbs, its flanks and shoulders the majority of
the Ana in that day were almost deformed, and certainly ill-shaped.
Again, the Frog had the power to live alike on land and in water- a mighty
privilege, partaking of a spiritual essence denied to the An, since the
disuse of his swimming-bladder clearly proves his degeneration from a
higher development of species. Again, the earlier races of the Ana seem
to have been covered with hair, and, even to a comparatively recent date,
hirsute bushes deformed the very faces of our ancestors, spreading wild
over their cheeks and chins, as similar bushes, my poor Tish, spread wild
over yours. But the object of the higher races of the Ana through
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countless generations has been to erase all vestige of connection with
hairy vertebrata, and they have gradually eliminated that debasing
capillary excrement by the law of sexual selection; the Gy-ei naturally
preferring youth or the beauty of smooth faces. But the degree of the
Frog in the scale of the vertebrata is shown in this, that he has no hair at all,
not even on his head. He was born to that hairless perfection which the
most beautiful of the Ana, despite the culture of incalculable ages, have
not yet attained. The wonderful complication and delicacy of a Frog’s
nervous system and arterial circulation were shown by this school to be
more susceptible of enjoyment than our inferior, or at least simpler,
physical frame allows us to be. The examination of a Frog’s hand, if I
may use that expression, accounted for its 78keener susceptibility to love,
and to social life in general. In fact, gregarious and amatory as are the
Ana, Frogs are still more so. In short, these two schools raged against
each other; one asserting the An to be the perfected type of the Frog; the
other that the Frog was the highest development of the An. The moralists
were divided in opinion with the naturalists, but the bulk of them sided
with the Frog-preference school. They said, with much plausibility, that
in moral conduct (viz., in the adherence to rules best adapted to the health
and welfare of the individual and the community) there could be no doubt
of the vast superiority of the Frog. All history showed the wholesale
immorality of the human race, the complete disregard, even by the most
renowned amongst them, of the laws which they acknowledged to be
essential to their own and the general happiness and wellbeing. But the
severest critic of the Frog race could not detect in their manners a single
aberration from the moral law tacitly recognised by themselves. And
what, after all, can be the profit of civilisation if superiority in moral
conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by which its
progress should be judged?
“In fine, the adherents of this theory presumed that in some remote
period the Frog race had been the improved development of the Human;
but that, from some causes which defied rational conjecture, they had not
maintained their original position in the scale of nature; while the Ana,
though of inferior organisation, had, by dint less of their virtues than their
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vices, such as ferocity and cunning, gradually acquired ascendancy, much
as among the human race itself tribes utterly barbarous have, by
superiority in similar vices, utterly destroyed or reduced into
insignificance tribes originally excelling them in mental gifts and culture.
Unhappily these disputes became involved with the religious notions of
that age; and as society was then administered under the government of
the Koom-Posh, who, being the most ignorant, were of course 79the most
inflammable class- the multitude took the whole question out of the hands
of the philosophers; political chiefs saw that the Frog dispute, so taken up
by the populace, could become a most valuable instrument of their
ambition; and for not less than one thousand years war and massacre
prevailed, during which period the philosophers on both sides were
butchered, and the government of Koom-Posh itself was happily brought
to an end by the ascendancy of a family that clearly established its descent
from the aboriginal tadpole, and furnished despotic rulers to the various
nations of the Ana. These despots finally disappeared, at least from our
communities, as the discovery of vril led to the tranquil institutions under
which flourish all the races of the Vril-ya.”
“And do no wranglers or philosophers now exist to revive the dispute;
or do they all recognise the origin of your race in the tadpole?”
“Nay, such disputes,” said Zee, with a lofty smile, “belong to the Pah-
bodh of the dark ages, and now only serve for the amusement of infants.
When we know the elements out of which our bodies are composed,
elements in common to the humblest vegetable plants, can it signify
whether the All-Wise combined those elements out of one form more than
another, in order to create that in which He has placed the capacity to
receive the idea of Himself, and all the varied grandeurs of intellect to
which that idea gives birth? The An in reality commenced to exist as An
with the donation of that capacity, and, with that capacity, the sense to
acknowledge that, however through the countless ages his race may
improve in wisdom, it can never combine the elements at its command
into the form of a tadpole.”
“You speak well, Zee,” said Aph-Lin; “and it is enough for us
shortlived mortals to feel a reasonable assurance that whether the origin of
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