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 triple the variety of nuts on Ploid, and they are used for food more generally than in our world. There is no such an animal as a hog and no lard is used. The substitute is found in four varieties of nut oil, the result of a sweet and clean vegetable growth. Nuts are raised in great abundance, for they also supply the base for a spread just as appetizing and more economical than butter.

The Ploidites have been traveling in the air for twenty-five hundred years, but they cannot control their air-ships sufficiently in all kinds of weather. The atmosphere of Ploid is relatively lighter than ours, which has made aerial travel more difficult to perfect than it would be in our world.

The main traffic, both passenger and freight, is carried on by the Tube Line, a wonderful system perfected through thousands of years of painstaking labor.

Two immense tubes, lying side by side, each ten feet in diameter, made of a substance more durable than steel, form the road bed of this lightning system of travel. The