'Others,' he said. 'Oh yes, Men?'

And I went on transmitting."

Cavor was continually making corrections in his previous accounts of the

Selenites as fresh facts flowed upon him to modify his conclusions, and

accordingly one gives the quotations that follow with a certain amount of

reservation. They are quoted from the ninth, thirteenth, and sixteenth

messages, and, altogether vague and fragmentary as they are, they probably

give as complete a picture of the social life of this strange community as

mankind can now hope to have for many generations.

In the moon," says Cavor, "every citizen knows his place. He is born to

that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and

surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has

neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. 'Why should he?'

Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a

mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end. They

check any incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage his

mathematical bias with a perfect psychological skill. His brain grows, or

at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and the rest of him

only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential part of him. At

last, save for rest and food, his one delight lies in the exercise and

display of his faculty, his one interest in its application, his sole

society with other specialists in his own line. His brain grows

continually larger, at least so far as the portions engaging in

271

The First Men In The Moon