reasoned it out. Here is a book I found in the library on electric
organs as they are discovered to exist in certain fish. Listen: 'They
are nervous apparatuses which in the arrangement of their parts may be
compared to a Voltaic pile. They develop electricity and give
electrical discharges.'"

"Well!" said Zara.

"You say 'Well!' as if you did not know!" I exclaimed half-angrily,
half-laughingly. "These fish have helped me to understand a great deal,
I assure you. Your brother must have discovered the seed or
commencement of electrical organs like those described, in the human
body; and he has cultivated them in you and in himself, and has brought
them to a high state of perfection. He has cultivated them in Raffaello
Cellini, and he is beginning to cultivate them in me, and I hope most
sincerely he will succeed. I think his theory is a magnificent one!"

Zara gazed seriously at me, and her large eyes seemed to grow darker
with the intensity of her thought.

"Supposing you had reasoned out the matter correctly," she said--"and I
will not deny that you have done a great deal towards the comprehension
of it--have you no fear? do you not include some drawbacks in even
Casimir's learning such a secret, and being able to cultivate and
educate such a deadly force as that of electricity in the human being?"

"If it is deadly, it is also life-giving," I answered. "Remedies are
also poisons. You laid the Prince senseless at your feet, but your
brother raised him up again. Both these things were done by
electricity. I can understand it all now; I see no obscurity, no
mystery. And oh, what a superb discovery it is!"

Zara smiled.

"You enthusiast!" she said, "it is nothing new. It was well known to
the ancient Chaldeans. It was known to Moses and his followers; it was
practised in perfection by Christ and His disciples. To modern
civilization it may seem a discovery, because the tendency Of all
so-called progress is to forget the past. The scent of the human savage
is extraordinarily keen--keener than that of any animal--he can follow
a track unerringly by some odour he is able to detect in the air.
Again, he can lay back his ears to the wind and catch a faint, far-off
sound with, certainty and precision, and tell you what it is. Civilized
beings have forgotten all this; they can neither smell nor hear with
actual keenness. Just in the same way, they have forgotten the use of
the electrical organs they all indubitably p