lapses of concentration during which he reverted to his plaintive
mumbling for food and recurrence to the statement that there was
a way out; but by firmness and patience the Englishman drew out
piece-meal a more or less lucid exposition of the remarkable
scheme of evolution that rules in Caspak. In it he found
explanations of the hitherto inexplicable. He discovered why he
had seen no babes or children among the Caspakian tribes with
which he had come in contact; why each more northerly tribe
evinced a higher state of development than those south of them;
why each tribe included individuals ranging in physical and
mental characteristics from the highest of the next lower race to
the lowest of the next higher, and why the women of each tribe
immersed themselves morning for an hour or more in the warm pools
near which the habitations of their people always were located;
and, too, he discovered why those pools were almost immune from
the attacks of carnivorous animals and reptiles.

He learned that all but those who were cos-ata-lu came up
cor-sva-jo, or from the beginning. The egg from which
they first developed into tadpole form was deposited, with
millions of others, in one of the warm pools and with it a
poisonous serum that the carnivora instinctively shunned.
Down the warm stream from the pool floated the countless billions
of eggs and tadpoles, developing as they drifted slowly toward
the sea. Some became tadpoles in the pool, some in the sluggish
stream and some not until they reached the great inland sea.
In the next stage they became fishes or reptiles, An-Tak was not
positive which, and in this form, always developing, they swam
far to the south, where, amid the rank and teeming jungles, some
of them evolved into amphibians. Always there were those whose