or verbal obligations. Then turning to his daughter, he said, "And you,
Zee, will not repeat to any one what the stranger has said, or may say,
to me or to you, of a world other than our own." Zee rose and kissed her
father on the temples, saying, with a smile, "A Gy's tongue is wanton,
but love can fetter it fast. And if, my father, you fear lest a chance
word from me or yourself could expose our community to danger, by a
desire to explore a world beyond us, will not a wave of the 'vril,'
properly impelled, wash even the memory of what we have heard the
stranger say out of the tablets of the brain?"

"What is the vril?" I asked.

Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood
very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an
exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it
comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which,
in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as
magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have
arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been
conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus
intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:--

"I have long held an opinion," says that illustrious experimentalist,
"almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other
lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the
forces of matter are made manifest, have one common origin; or, in other
words, are so directly related and mutually dependent that they are
convertible, as it were into one another, and possess equivalents of
power in their action. These subterranean philosophers assert that by
one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call 'atmospheric