contrived to be seated as near the fire as was consistent with his
other object of having a perfect command of the table and its
apparatus; which consisted not only of the ordinary comforts of tea
and toast, but of a delicious supply of new-laid eggs, and a
magnificent round of beef; against which Mr Escot immediately pointed
all the artillery of his eloquence, declaring the use of animal food,
conjointly with that of fire, to be one of the principal causes of the
present degeneracy of mankind. "The natural and original man," said
he, "lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied
his simple nutriment: he had few desires, and no diseases. But, when
he began to sacrifice victims on the altar of superstition, to pursue
the goat and the deer, and, by the pernicious invention of fire, to
pervert their flesh into food, luxury, disease, and premature death,
were let loose upon the world. Such is clearly the correct
interpretation of the fable of Prometheus, which is the symbolical
portraiture of that disastrous epoch, when man first applied fire to
culinary purposes, and thereby surrendered his liver to the vulture of
disease. From that period the stature of mankind has been in a state
of gradual diminution, and I have not the least doubt that it will
continue to grow _small by degrees, and lamentably less_, till the
whole race will vanish imperceptibly from the face of the earth."

"I cannot agree," said Mr Foster, "in the consequences being so very
disastrous. I admit, that in some respects the use of animal food
retards, though it cannot materially inhibit, the perfectibility of
the species. But the use of fire was indispensably necessary, as
AEschylus and Virgil expressly assert, to give being to the various
arts of life, which, in their rapid and interminable progress, will
finally conduct every individual of the race to the philosophic
pinnacle of pure and perfect felicity."