models of contrivances worked by the
agency of vril; for here, merely by a certain play of her vril staff,
she herself standing at a distance, she put into movement large and
weighty substances. She seemed to endow them with intelligence, and to
make them comprehend and obey her command. She set complicated pieces of
machinery into movement, arrested the movement or continued it, until,
within an incredibly short time, various kinds of raw material were
reproduced as symmetrical works of art, complete and perfect. Whatever
effect mesmerism or electro-biology produces over the nerves and muscles
of animated objects, this young Gy produced by the motions of her
slender rod over the springs and wheels of lifeless mechanism.

When I mentioned to my companions my astonishment at this influence
over inanimate matter--while owning that, in our world, I had witnessed
phenomena which showed that over certain living organisations certain
other living organisations could establish an influence genuine in
itself, but often exaggerated by credulity or craft--Zee, who was more
interested in such subjects than her father, bade me stretch forth my
hand, and then, placing it beside her own, she called my attention to
certain distinctions of type and character. In the first place, the
thumb of the Gy (and, as I afterwards noticed, of all that race, male or
female) was much larger, at once longer and more massive, than is found
with our species above ground. There is almost, in this, as great a
difference as there is between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla.
Secondly, the palm is proportionally thicker than ours--the texture of
the skin infinitely finer and softer--its average warmth is greater.
More remarkable than all this, is a visible nerve, perceptible under the
skin, which starts from the wrist skirting the ball of the thumb, and
branching, fork-like, at the roots of the fore and middle fingers. "With
your slight formation of thumb," said the philosophical young Gy, "and
with the absence of the nerve which you find more or less developed in
the hands of our race, you can never achieve other than imperfect
and feeble power over the agency of vril; but so far as the nerve is
concerned, that is not found in the hands of our earliest progenitors,
nor in those of the ruder tribes without the pale of the Vril-ya. It has
been slowly developed in the course of generations, commencing in the
early achievements, and increasing with th