Art also steps in to help the process of the higher evolution. Our physicians have discovered that the small and tender sides of an infant Polygon of the higher class can be fractured, and his whole frame reset, with such exactness that a Polygon of two or three hundred sides sometimes⁠—by no means always, for the process is attended with serious risk⁠—but sometimes overleaps two or three hundred generations, and as it were doubles at a stroke, the number of his progenitors and the nobility of his descent.

Many a promising child is sacrificed in this way. Scarcely one out of ten survives. Yet so strong is the parental ambition among those Polygons who are, as it were, on the fringe of the Circular class, that it is very rare to find a nobleman of that position in society, who has neglected to place his firstborn in the Circular Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium before he has attained the age of a month.