that the unlimited growth of the lunar brain has rendered unnecessary the invention of all those mechanical aids to brain work which have distinguished the career of man.  There are no books, no records of any sort, no libraries or inscriptions.  All knowledge is stored in distended brains much as the honey-ants of Texas store honey in their distended abdomens.  The lunar Somerset House and the lunar British Museum Library are collections of living brains...

“The less specialised administrators, I note, do for the most part take a very lively interest in me whenever they encounter me.  They will come out of the way and stare at me and ask questions to which Phi-oo will reply.  I see them going hither and thither with a retinue of bearers, attendants, shouters, parachute-carriers, and so forth—­queer groups to see.  The experts for the most part ignore me completely, even as they ignore each other, or notice me only to begin a clamorous exhibition of their 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 parachutes are, I gather, of the operative class.  ‘Machine hands,’ indeed, some of these are in actual nature—­it is not figure of speech, the single tentacle of the mooncalf herd is profoundly modified for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary subordinate appendages to these important mechanisms, have enormously developed