ce of gravitation. Man's walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles
against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth's
face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric--magnetic
vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again,
Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of
the current.

"Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern
rapidly and he seems to be flying. We have none of the awkward fallings
and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.

"I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of
the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a
rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.

"Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to admit the vibrations
of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a
series of leaps--just as we do when the motion-picture operator
slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of
stumbles.

"Very well--so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomenon which the
human mind cannot conceive as possible; therefore intellectually we
still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human
thought cannot encompass which it need fear."

"Metallic," he said, "and crystalline. And yet--why not? What are we but
bags of skin filled with certain substances in solution and stretched
over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of
that primeval jelly which Gregory * calls Protobion came after untold
millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too,
the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny
hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell
of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering
wonder of the mother-of-pearl.

* J. W. Gregory, F.R.S.D.Sc., Professor of Geology,
University of Glasgow.

"Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think
not."

"Not materially," I answered. "No. But there remains--consciousness!"

"That," he said, "I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of--how did he put
it?--a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above
and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got--glimpses--Goodwin,
but I cannot understand."

"We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these
T