The portraits are of the philosopher himself, of his grandfather, and great-grandfather.  They are all at full length.  The philosopher is attired in a long tunic which seems to form a loose suit of scaly armour, borrowed, perhaps, from some fish or reptile, but the feet and hands are exposed:  the digits in both are wonderfully long, and webbed.  He has little or no perceptible throat, and a low receding forehead, not at all the ideal of a sage’s.  He has bright brown prominent eyes, a very wide mouth and high cheekbones, and a muddy complexion.  According to tradition, this philosopher had lived to a patriarchal age, extending over many centuries, and he remembered distinctly in middle life his grandfather as surviving, and in childhood his great-grandfather; the portrait of the first he had taken, or caused to be taken, while yet alive—­that of the latter was taken from his effigies in mummy.  The portrait of his grandfather had the features and aspect of the philosopher, only much more exaggerated:  he was not dressed, and the colour of his body was singular; the breast and stomach yellow, the shoulders and legs of a dull bronze hue:  the great-grandfather was a magnificent specimen of the Batrachian genus, a Giant Frog, ’pur et simple.’

Among the pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, this is notably recorded:  “Humble yourselves, my descendants; the father of your race was a ‘twat’ (tadpole):  exalt yourselves, my descendants, for it was the same Divine Thought which created your father that develops itself in exalting you.”

Aph-Lin told me this fable while I gazed on the three Batrachian portraits.  I said in reply:  “You make a jest of my supposed ignorance and credulity as an uneducated Tish, but though these horrible daubs may be of great antiquity, and were intended, perhaps, for some rude caracature, I presume that none of your race even in the less enlightened ages, ever believed that the great-grandson of a Frog became a sententious philosopher; or that any section, I will not say of the lofty Vril-ya, but of the meanest varieties of the human race, had its origin in a Tadpole.”

“Pardon me,” answered Aph-Lin:  “in what we call the Wrangling or Philosophical Period of History, which was at its height about seven thousand years ago, there was a very distinguished naturalist, who proved to the satisfaction of numerous disciples such analogical and anatomical agreements in structure between an An and a Frog, as to show that out of the one must have developed the other.  They had some diseases in common; they were both subject to the same parasitical worms in the intestines; and, strange to say, the An has, in his structure, a swimming-bladder, no longer of any use to him, but which is a rudiment that clearly proves his descent from a Frog.  Nor is there any argument against this theory to be found in the relative difference of size, for there are still existent in our world Frogs of a size and stature not inferior to our own, and many thousand years ago they appear to have been still larger.”