er disputed our absolute statements, only made notes of them.

"If that is so, then our improvement must be due either to mutation, or
solely to education," she gravely pursued. "We certainly have improved.
It may be that all these higher qualities were latent in the original
mother, that careful education is bringing them out, and that our
personal differences depend on slight variations in prenatal condition."

"I think it is more in your accumulated culture," Jeff suggested. "And
in the amazing psychic growth you have made. We know very little about
methods of real soul culture--and you seem to know a great deal."

Be that as it might, they certainly presented a higher level of active
intelligence, and of behavior, than we had so far really grasped. Having
known in our lives several people who showed the same delicate courtesy
and were equally pleasant to live with, at least when they wore their
"company manners," we had assumed that our companions were a carefully
chosen few. Later we were more and more impressed that all this gentle
breeding was breeding; that they were born to it, reared in it, that it
was as natural and universal with them as the gentleness of doves or the
alleged wisdom of serpents.

As for the intelligence, I confess that this was the most impressive
and, to me, most mortifying, of any single feature of Herland. We soon
ceased to comment on this or other matters which to them were such
obvious commonplaces as to call forth embarrassing questions about our
own conditions.

This was nowhere better shown than in that matter of food supply, which
I will now attempt to describe.

Having improved their agriculture to the highest point, and carefully
estimated the number of persons who could comfortably live on their
square miles; having then limited their population to that number, one
would think that was all there was to be done. But they had not thought
so. To them the country was a unit--it was theirs. They themselves were
a unit, a conscious group; they thought in terms of the community. As
such, their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an
individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried out
plans for improvement which might cover centuries.

I had never seen, had scarcely imagined, human beings undertaking such
a work as the deliberate replanting of an entire forest area with
different kinds of trees. Yet this seemed to them the simplest common
sen