CHAPTER IX. -The coming Race

this attempt fails, or where, as in the rabbit-kind, the creature is too
multiplicatory to be so taught, that it is destroyed. The flesh of the
animals when killed is never eaten. Indeed, the Ana regard with
abhorrence the idea of making the carcass of any living thing the nutriment
of their bodies; and their food, artificially prepared, is not analogous to
anything we use. I should class it rather among vegetables than meats.
Many of their plants are composed of farinaceous substances easy of
digestion, in which they contrive to mingle those mineral salts which are
healthful to the system, especially lime, but which in our apothecary
vade-mecums would seem to have very indigestible names. So dexterous
have they become in these chemical preparations that they can communicate
to masses of the nutriment as prepared for the herculean appetite of an
Ana the taste and the semblance of whatever production of the upper
world, animal or vegetable, he may desire. Even in the vegetable
kingdom their botanists produce new varieties- some of them of great
beauty- so far as beauty can be 41applied to plants in which colour is
wanting. Traditions so darkly hint that the ancestors of the Vril-ya being
wiser in all mechanical inventions than suited to their social state of
primitive lawlessness, destroyed themselves by the effects of some
terrible explosive compounded by blind chance, that, with a unanimous
representation from the College of Sages, they forbade the making of any
compound in which the qualities of explosion could be found. At the
same time, with a wondrous fatuity to which human reason is subjected in
all states of existence, they continued to store in their magazines of
research the two component parts of the deadly compound, saying
philosophically, “Knowledge is in itself a good, though it may be
occasionally applied to evil.” The same sage authorities forbid all
attempts to construct any aerial vessel; and, indeed, the superstitious
dread with which they regard the few bold spirits that from time to time
have sought to solve the mysteries of aerial space suffices, without law, to
prevent such investigations. But while these experiments are
discontinued, lest they should result in the invention of some new
agent of destruction that might perchance annihilate the species, the
vivid imagination of the Vril-ya persuades them that it is reserved for
posterity to become the Ariels of the air, and that, when the An has
reached that phase of his destinies, the earth itself will become too small
for his habitation and his numbers; he will necessarily discover a mode, by
mechanical contrivances, for visiting wings of birds and planets now only
visible to his wondering ignorance, and poor indeed will be his heritage of
Vril, if, even on his globe, matter, the most opposite to the aërial
lightness of ether, will not supply him with the means to launch himself
into the ocean of space.