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Rh those faculties of his body with which nature has so liberally endowed him."

I should have had no great difficulty in refuting these gross sophisms, but my experience of Colymbians had taught me that they were singularly intolerant of opposition; that, unlike the true philosophers of my native country, they preferred their system to truth, and disliked those who produced facts that militated against their theories. As I did not wish to forfeit the friendship of my young companion, I left his bundle of arguments unanswered, and merely ventured to hint that, though an aquatic life was possible and perhaps even desirable in these tropical regions where the temperature of the water was high, yet it was not practicable in higher latitudes where the water was so cold that it would rapidly abstract all the heat of the body, and any one who attempted to live in the water must soon perish from the mere abstraction of his animal heat.

"I grant," he said, "that at present such would be the case. But, no doubt, the ingenuity of man is equal to the task of finding some method of warming the water sufficiently to enable him to live in it in comfort, even in the highest latitudes.

"But supposing you are not ripe for such an invention yet, why not come and live where the water is always warm enough for you? There are millions of square miles of warm sea in the tropics, which could easily contain the whole human race. Before these are fully peopled, I have not a doubt that a method of heating the colder water will be discovered. Your objection reminds me of the cry of alarm lately raised in your country about the imminent exhaustion of your coal, when you had still remaining a supply for