Our scientists had visited selected areas, and recommendations had been made. It was decided that Southern Continent I would be used mainly for agriculture. We had recently acquired our Colonised Planet 23 (C.P. 23) found it well able to sustain large-scale settlement, provided it was supplied with food. This being part of the same system as Rohanda, and quite close, we thought from the start of using one or other of the southern continents as an agricultural base. S.C. I was admirably equipped from the point of view of soil and climate. It was roughly divided into three zones, the middle one, equatorial, being too hot, but the other two, the southern part and the northern, useful for a vast variety of plants. We introduced several grain plants from both our colonised planets and those of Canopus and developed some indigenous grasses to supply grains and also developed locally-originating tubers and leaf crops. I was not directly in charge of this enterprise. Those interested will find accounts of S.C. I’s twenty-thousand-year career as a food supplier for C.P. 23 in the appropriate documents. During this time, too, several laboratories were maintained on that continent, and a good deal of useful research accomplished. This was nearly all to do with agriculture and the use of indigenous and introduced animals. Our C.P. 23 flourished during this period. Its inhabitants originated on our Home Planet, of first-class stock, carefully selected. None of their energies needed to be spent on feeding themselves, or on anxieties about their nurture; they had their attention free for mentation and intellectual activity. This twenty-thousand year period was C.P. 23’s Golden Age, when it achieved the position of Planning Centre for the whole of our Empire. The fact that it was short-lived does not detract from this achievement.

I do not propose to say much more about the experiments on S.C. I. Nor shall I be giving full or even balanced accounts of our experiments on Isolated S.C. II. Details can be found under the appropriate headings.