unknown country. So that the wearing of green shark's-skin collars by the professors of transcendental geography was one of those anomalies of which I found so many examples among the Colymbians.
The evidence in support of the reality of the unknown country and of everything relating to it being so slight, the accounts of it in the old books being so vague and contradictory, and the principles of transcendental geography being so deficient in precision and definiteness, the professors differ very much among themselves as to almost all matters connected with the subject. In fact, they often hold and teach precisely opposite views.
There is no board or council connected with the Colleges of Transcendental Geography to whom disputed points can be referred. The highest legal authority—which, by the way, knows nothing of transcendental geography—is alone entitled to decide what is correct teaching—what incorrect. Accordingly, when one professor disapproves of the teaching of another professor, he is at liberty to cite his colleague before the legal tribunal in order to obtain a decision as to the correctness of the matter taught.
A case of this sort occurred during my residence in Colymbia. A professor of transcendental geography had publicly taught that the inhabitants of the unknown country were not of terrestrial habits, as had been usually believed, but inhabited the water like the Colymbians. The chief force of his argument lay in this: that as life in the unknown country was universally acknowledged to be an advance on life here, and as the aquatic habits of the Colymbians were without doubt and by general agreement allowed to be a far higher state of being than life on land, it
