“This skull,” said he, “is the skull of a hero, palai katatethneiotos[10.1], and sufficiently demonstrates a point, concerning which I never myself entertained a doubt, that the human race is undergoing a gradual process of diminution, in length, breadth, and thickness.  Observe this skull.  Even the skull of our reverend friend, which is the largest and thickest in the company, is not more than half its size.  The frame this skull belonged to could scarcely have been less than nine feet high.  Such is the lamentable progress of degeneracy and decay.  In the course of ages, a boot of the present generation would form an ample chateau for a large family of our remote posterity.  The mind, too, participates in the contraction of the body.  Poets and philosophers of all ages and nations have lamented this too visible process of physical and moral deterioration.  ‘The sons of little men’, says Ossian. ‘Oioi nun brotoi eisin,’ says Homer:  ‘such men as live in these degenerate days.’  ‘All things,’ says Virgil, ’have a retrocessive tendency, and grow worse and worse by the inevitable doom of fate.’[10.2] ‘We live in the ninth age,’ says Juvenal, ’an age worse than the age of iron; nature has no metal sufficiently pernicious to give a denomination to its wickedness.’[10.3] ‘Our fathers,’ says Horace, ’worse than our grandfathers, have given birth to us, their more vicious progeny, who, in our turn, shall become the parents of a still viler generation.’[10.4] You all know the fable of the buried Pict, who bit off the end of a pickaxe, with which sacrilegious hands were breaking open his grave, and called out with a voice like subterranean thunder, I perceive the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your little finger! videlicet, the pickaxe.  This, to be sure, is a fiction; but it shows the prevalent opinion, the feeling, the conviction, of absolute, universal, irremediable deterioration.”

“I should be sorry,” said Mr Foster, “that such an opinion should become universal, independently of my conviction of its fallacy.  Its general admission would tend, in a great measure, to produce the very evils it appears to lament.  What could be its effect, but to check the ardour of investigation, to extinguish the zeal of philanthropy, to freeze the current of enterprising hope, to bury in the torpor of scepticism and in the stagnation of despair, every better faculty of the human mind, which will necessarily become retrograde in ceasing to be progressive?”

“I am inclined to think, on the contrary,” said Mr Escot, “that the deterioration of man is accelerated by his blindness—­in many respects wilful blindness—­to the truth of the fact itself, and to the causes which produce it; that there is no hope whatever of ameliorating his condition but in a total and radical change of the whole scheme of human life, and that the advocates of his indefinite perfectibility are in reality the greatest enemies to the practical possibility of their own system, by so strenuously labouring to impress on his attention that he is going on in a good way, while he is really in a deplorably bad one.”