and up holstered to be able to live at all.  He is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities.  He is always under going repairs.  A machine that is as unreliable as he is would have no market.  The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience.  The original cave man, the troglodyte, may have got his that way.  But now they come through months and months of cruel torture, and at a time of life when he is least able to bear it.  As soon as he gets them they must all be pulled out again, for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a night’s rest.  The second set will answer for a while; but he will never get a set that can be depended on until the dentist makes one.  The animals are not much troubled that way.  In a wild state, a natural state, they have few diseases; their main one is old age.  But man starts in as a child and lives on diseases to the end as a regular diet.  He has mumps, measles, whooping-cough, croup, tonsilitis, diphtheria, scarlet-fever, as a matter of course.  Afterward, as he goes along, his life continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, quinsy, consumption, yellow-fever, blindness, influenza, carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain, diseases of the heart and bones, and a thousand other maladies of one sort and another.  He’s just a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes.  Look at the workmanship of him in some of its particulars.  What are his tonsils for?  They perform no useful function; they have no value.  They are but a trap for tonsilitis and quinsy.  And what is the appendix for?  It has no value.  Its sole interest is to lie and wait for stray grape-seeds and breed trouble.  What is his beard for?  It is just a nuisance.  All nations persecute it with the razor.  Nature, however, always keeps him supplied with it, instead of putting it on his head, where it ought to be.  You seldom see a man bald-headed on his chin, but on his head.  A man wants to keep his hair.  It is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best of all protections against weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubies, and Nature half the time puts it on so it won’t stay.

“Man’s sight and smell and hearing are all inferior.  If he were suited to the conditions he could smell an enemy; he could hear him; he could see him, just as the animals can detect their enemies.  The robin hears the earthworm burrowing his course under the ground; the bloodhound follows a scent that is two days old.  Man isn’t even handsome, as compared with the birds; and as for style, look at the Bengal tiger—­that ideal of grace, physical perfection, and majesty.  Think of the lion and the tiger and the leopard, and then think of man—­that poor thing!—­the animal of the wig, the ear-trumpet, the glass eye, the porcelain teeth, the wooden leg, the trepanned skull, the silver wind-pipe—­a creature that is mended and patched all over from top to bottom.  If he can’t get renewals of his bric-a-brac in the next world what will he look like?  He has just that one stupendous superiority—­his imagination, his intellect.  It makes him supreme—­the higher animals can’t match him there.  It’s very curious.”