Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/80

 tissue, and is, in fact, everlasting. There is thus, of course, an enormous advantage over the periodical decay, and the sere and yellow leaf of mere nature. And, again, as to the fragrance question, old botanical descriptions tell us that often the most showy plants and flowers have little or no smell, or even an unpleasant odour. Why repeat such defects by exactly imitating nature! On the contrary, we impart the most delicious perfumes, and keep them exhaling, at our option, night and day, summer and winter. In the same free and excelsior spirit, we have not strictly limited ourselves to nature's exact forms. We enslaved ourselves at first by a needless fidelity of that narrow kind, searching through countless varieties of natural form, modern or fossil, for such as most took our fancy. But now we give free play to imagination in all that matter, always remembering that imagination and its cravings are a part of our nature as much as anything else, and mostly, too, by far the pleasanter part of it.

Then, again, the water, that delightful set-off to the whole landscape, may be either manufactured in each sub, according to its own wants, or may form part of the general energy contract. The water-facture interest is, of course, a great concern of these times, since the old system of seas, rivers, and natural supplies has all passed away. The fine rock-scenery that usually characterises water-factories, and is so pleasing to the eye, is simply the spare store of water, kept in the cross-electrified solid oxyhydrogen form, ready to dissolve into pure water on the application of the cross-electric. All our countless modern dwellings are now as amply, and far more regularly and