ful complication and
delicacy of a Frog's nervous system and arterial circulation were shown
by this school to be more susceptible of enjoyment than our inferior, or
at least simpler, physical frame allows us to be. The examination of
a Frog's hand, if I may use that expression, accounted for its keener
susceptibility to love, and to social life in general. In fact,
gregarious and amatory as are the Ana, Frogs are still more so. In
short, these two schools raged against each other; one asserting the An
to be the perfected type of the Frog; the other that the Frog was the
highest development of the An. The moralists were divided in
opinion with the naturalists, but the bulk of them sided with the
Frog-preference school. They said, with much plausibility, that in moral
conduct (viz., in the adherence to rules best adapted to the health and
welfare of the individual and the community) there could be no doubt
of the vast superiority of the Frog. All history showed the wholesale
immorality of the human race, the complete disregard, even by the
most renowned amongst them, of the laws which they acknowledged to be
essential to their own and the general happiness and wellbeing. But the
severest critic of the Frog race could not detect in their manners a
single aberration from the moral law tacitly recognised by themselves.
And what, after all, can be the profit of civilisation if superiority in
moral conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by which
its progress should be judged?

"In fine, the adherents of this theory presumed that in some remote
period the Frog race had been the improved development of the Human; but
that, from some causes which defied rational conjecture, they had not
maintained their original position in the scale of nature; while the
Ana, though of inferior organisation, had, by dint less of their virtues
than their vices, such as ferocity and cunning, gradually acquired
ascendancy, much as among the human race itself tribes utterly barbarous
have, by superiority in similar vices, utterly destroyed or reduced
into insignificance tribes originally excelling them in mental gifts
and culture. Unhappily these disputes became involved with the religious
notions of that age; and as society was then administered under the
government of the Koom-Posh, who, being the most ignorant, were of
course the most inflammable class--the multitude took the whole question
out of the hands of the philosophers;