Of the physical agencies mentioned in the following pages, that of electricity will be found especially prominent.  Both the knowledge and the manipulation of electricity have assumed in Montalluyah proportions far beyond those known to us.  The electric fluid is there employed for the most various purposes:  for locomotion, for lightening heavy bodies, for increasing the power of optical instruments, for the detection and eradication of the germs of disease, for increasing the efficiency of musical instruments—­in a word, for the advancement of the world in all that belongs to morality, science, and art.

To some readers the plural form, “Electricities,” which frequently appears in the following pages, might seem a strange innovation.  The Editor therefore states, by way of anticipation, that in certain important points the electrical science of Montalluyah differs from, if it is not opposed to, some of the principles accepted here.  In Montalluyah it is an ascertained fact that everything organic or inorganic possesses an electricity of its own, each kind differing from the others in one or more important properties.  Glimmerings of the progress effected in electricity and other sciences, including the knowledge and application of Sun-power, may be deduced from the facts contained in the fragments.  Still, those glimmerings are but as scattered rays of light in the horizon, which, in the belief of the Editor, are mere precursors of other revelations at least equally interesting.  It may be said generally that by the fragments here given, showing how the Narrator, uniting in his own person all the highest qualities of a Legislator and a Ruler, occupied himself with the discovery and application of means for the reduction of evils to their smallest possible proportions, not only giving new laws of wondrous grandeur and beauty, but eventually rendering compliance with them easy and even delightful—­that by these fragments a truly stupendous polity is but partially revealed.

The Editor has reason to believe, though it cannot be stated with confidence, that Montalluyah is the world known to us as the planet Mars.  Even in the following pages indications will be found of physical features harmonizing with observations made here on that planet.  On the other hand, there is the seeming objection, that whereas Mars is more distant than the Earth from the Sun, the Sun appears much smaller, and its heat and light are less intense, on the Earth than in Montalluyah.  These facts would, in the first instance, seem to indicate, not a longer, but a shorter distance of Montalluyah from the central luminary, and to point rather to Venus or Mercury than to Mars.  But, according to the scientific theories of Montalluyah, the amount of light and heat received from the Sun, and the aspect of that luminary, are governed, not so much by proximity, as by the nature and electricity of the recipient planet and its surrounding atmosphere.  In illustration of this point the fact is stated in one of the fragments, that in Montalluyah the power of the telescope is regulated, not by the distance, but by the attractive or repulsive electricity of the planet under observation, and that more power is often required to view a nearer planet than one which is far more distant.