Sentences and Paragraphs Author:John Davidson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. When the heart and motives of conduct are in question, science may as well poison itself with its last discovery, and philosophy drown itself in its tub, ... more »as pretend to lay down the law. chapter{Section 4V. The human animal has steadily improved, ridding itself as civilization advanced of all monstrous and malformed races, such as the one-legged tribe with mushroom feet that did for tents, the headless men whose faces were in their chests, the people whose ears served them for Inverness capes, the one-eyed men, the dog-headed men, the elephant-headed men, the centaurs, the satyrs, and the sphinxes. These long ago disappeared so completely from the face of the earth, that if poets, historians, and draughtsmen had not made descriptions and drawings while they were extant, at least in memory, we should have lost all authentic trace of them; even Africa can now boast of nothing more curious than a tribe ofpigmies, well enough formed, and with all their members. Perhaps one may be allowed to confess to a lingering wish that it were still possible to make the acquaintance of some gentle lady centaur ; on the whole, however, one is glad to be rid of all those other unfortunate miscreations. But the brute beasts have sadly degenerated. It is not so much that remarkable species have become extinct; it is the lamentable deterioration in those that remain. The fox, for example—what a beast he once was. His craft is probably as distinguished as ever, but his medicinal qualities seem all to have faded. His flesh, his blood, his lungs, his liver, his lights, powdered, or baked, or boiled, were sovereign remedies for wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores, and all the internal diseases flesh is heir to. Then the zebra—he was indeed an animal. His skin, half an inch thick, was atta...« less