ad, and awaited events with the most admirable fortitude. When I had
escorted him to the pavement, and further to his own hostelry, he
seized the third button of my waistcoat and spake as follows:--

"It is an admirable example of the wisdom of nature that she has
refrained in every case from equipping her creatures with wheels
instead of legs, and she might easily have done this. So far as I am
aware there are but four methods of progression in nature--these are,
flying, swimming, walking and crawling. None of these are performed
with a rotary motion, and all are admirably adapted to the people using
them, and are sufficiently expeditious to suit their needs.

"There is no doubt that the most primitive of movements is that of
crawling, and by this method of progression, one is brought into an
intimate contact with the earth which cannot fail to be beneficial. I
do not see any real difficulty in the way of our again becoming a race
of happy and crawling people. The initial essay towards this end is to
shed our arms and legs as useless incumbrances, and then to aim at a
stronger growth of jaw and cranium. Among certain organisms it will be
found that the jaws are the most immediately useful parts of the body,
performing the most varied and delicate functions with the greatest
ease. A dog, for example, will, with the one organ, play with a ball,
kill a cat, or nip the calf of a Christian, and, when the moon is high,
he can make a noise with his mouth which is as loud and quite as
melodious as the professional clamour of a ballad-vocalist.

"One of the greatest evils of civilisation is the longing for speed,
which, within the past hundred years, has developed from a simple vice
to a complicated mania. Long ago men were accustomed to use their legs
in order to propel themselves forward, and, when greater speed was
necessary, they assisted their legs with their hands--this was coeval
with, or shortly after, the arboreal age. Next came the hunting epoch,
when some person, probably a commercial traveller, dropped off a tree
on to a horse's back, and finding the movement pleasant he informed his
companions of his adventure and demonstrated to them how it had been
performed. It is from this occurrence we may date the degradation of
the human race and the industry of horse-stealing. There followed the
pastoral age, when nuts were, more or less, abandoned as a food and
tillage became general. The necessity for conveying the crops