e 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."

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 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