At this stage, it is true, there is a laboratory as well as a museum in the giant’s castle; he can illustrate the marvels of steam and suggest experiments with electricity. Yet this is only a more practical Circle of the Sciences. The children’s voices are trained to the question and answer of a “Guide to Knowledge”; their lives are marked off in lesson-periods. Even when a dull journey offers the means of escape, these little captives hug their chains. They never travel without books, and when there is nothing to observe from the carriage windows, they find education in the forests of the Oroonoko, where the plague of flies affords “an inexhaustible subject of conversation.”