distinctive skill. The erudite for the most part are rapt in an impervious

and apoplectic complacency, from which only a denial of their erudition

can rouse them. Usually they are led about by little watchers and

attendants, and often there are small and active-looking creatures, small

females usually, that I am inclined to think are a sort of wife to them;

but some of the profounder scholars are altogether too great for

locomotion, and are carried from place to place in a sort of sedan tub,

wabbling jellies of knowledge that enlist my respectful astonishment. I

have just passed one in coming to this place where I am permitted to amuse

myself with these electrical toys, a vast, shaven, shaky head, bald and

thin-skinned, carried on his grotesque stretcher. In front and behind came

his bearers, and curious, almost trumpet-faced, news disseminators

shrieked his fame.

"I have already mentioned the retinues that accompany most of the

intellectuals: ushers, bearers, valets, extraneous tentacles and muscles,

as it were, to replace the abortive physical powers of these hypertrophied

minds. Porters almost invariably accompany them. There are also extremely

swift messengers with spider-like legs and 'hands' for grasping

parachutes, and attendants with vocal organs that could well nigh wake the

dead. Apart from their controlling intelligence these subordinates are as

inert and helpless as umbrellas in a stand. They exist only in relation to

the orders they have to obey, the duties they have to perform.

The bulk of these insects, however, who go to and fro upon the spiral

ways, who fill the ascending balloons and drop past me clinging to flimsy

The First Men In The Moon