red to show our way was better.

There was growing in our minds, at least in Jeff's and mine, a
keen appreciation of the advantages of this strange country and its
management. Terry remained critical. We laid most of it to his nerves.
He certainly was irritable.

The most conspicuous feature of the whole land was the perfection of
its food supply. We had begun to notice from that very first walk in the
forest, the first partial view from our 'plane. Now we were taken to see
this mighty garden, and shown its methods of culture.

The country was about the size of Holland, some ten or twelve
thousand square miles. One could lose a good many Hollands along the
forest-smothered flanks of those mighty mountains. They had a population
of about three million--not a large one, but quality is something. Three
million is quite enough to allow for considerable variation, and these
people varied more widely than we could at first account for.

Terry had insisted that if they were parthenogenetic they'd be as alike
as so many ants or aphids; he urged their visible differences as proof
that there must be men--somewhere.

But when we asked them, in our later, more intimate conversations, how
they accounted for so much divergence without cross-fertilization,
they attributed it partly to the careful education, which followed each
slight tendency to differ, and partly to the law of mutation. This they
had found in their work with plants, and fully proven in their own case.

Physically they were more alike than we, as they lacked all morbid or
excessive types. They were tall, strong, healthy, and beautiful as a
race, but differed individually in a wide range of feature, coloring,
and expression.

"But surely the most important growth is in mind--and in the things we
make," urged Somel. "Do you find your physical variation accompanied by
a proportionate variation in ideas, feelings, and products? Or, among
people who look more alike, do you find their internal life and their
work as similar?"

We were rather doubtful on this point, and inclined to hold that there
was more chance of improvement in greater physical variation.

"It certainly should be," Zava admitted. "We have always thought it a
grave initial misfortune to have lost half our little world. Perhaps
that is one reason why we have so striven for conscious improvement."

"But acquired traits are not transmissible," Terry declared. "Weissman
has proved that."

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