“I understand that,” said I, “because Frogs this enormous are, according to our eminent geologists, who perhaps saw them in dreams, said to have been distinguished inhabitants of the upper world before the Deluge; and such Frogs are exactly the creatures likely to have flourished in the lakes and morasses of your subterranean regions.  But pray, proceed.”

“In the Wrangling Period of History, whatever one sage asserted another sage was sure to contradict.  In fact, it was a maxim in that age, that the human reason could only be sustained aloft by being tossed to and fro in the perpetual motion of contradiction; and therefore another sect of philosophers maintained the doctrine that the An was not the descendant of the Frog, but that the Frog was clearly the improved development of the An.  The shape of the Frog, taken generally, was much more symmetrical than that of the An; beside the beautiful conformation of its lower limbs, its flanks and shoulders the majority of the Ana in that day were almost deformed, and certainly ill-shaped.  Again, the Frog had the power to live alike on land and in water—­a mighty privilege, partaking of a spiritual essence denied to the An, since the disuse of his swimming-bladder clearly proves his degeneration from a higher development of species.  Again, the earlier races of the Ana seem to have been covered with hair, and, even to a comparatively recent date, hirsute bushes deformed the very faces of our ancestors, spreading wild over their cheeks and chins, as similar bushes, my poor Tish, spread wild over yours.  But the object of the higher races of the Ana through countless generations has been to erase all vestige of connection with hairy vertebrata, and they have gradually eliminated that debasing capillary excrement by the law of sexual selection; the Gy-ei naturally preferring youth or the beauty of smooth faces.  But the degree of the Frog in the scale of the vertebrata is shown in this, that he has no hair at all, not even on his head.  He was born to that hairless perfection which the most beautiful of the Ana, despite the culture of incalculable ages, have not yet attained.  The wonderful 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