either of wine or animal food; it is, therefore, by no means
incredible that they lived to the age of several centuries, free from
war, and commerce, and arbitrary government, and every other species
of desolating wickedness. But man was then a very different animal to
what he now is: he had not the faculty of speech; he was not
encumbered with clothes; he lived in the open air; his first step out
of which, as Hamlet truly observes, is _into his grave_[5.1]. His
first dwellings, of course, were the hollows of trees and rocks. In
process of time he began to build: thence grew villages; thence grew
cities. Luxury, oppression, poverty, misery, and disease kept pace
with the progress of his pretended improvements, till, from a free,
strong, healthy, peaceful animal, he has become a weak, distempered,
cruel, carnivorous slave.

_The Reverend Doctor Gaster._
Your doctrine is orthodox, in so far as you assert that the original
man was not encumbered with clothes, and that he lived in the open
air; but, as to the faculty of speech, that, it is certain, he had,
for the authority of Moses----

_Mr Escot._
Of course, sir, I do not presume to dissent from the very exalted
authority of that most enlightened astronomer and profound
cosmogonist, who had, moreover, the advantage of being inspired; but
when I indulge myself with a ramble in the fields of speculation, and
attempt to deduce what is probable and rational from the sources of
analysis, experience, and comparison, I confess I am too often apt to
lose sight of the doctrines of that great fountain of theological and
geological philosophy.