the eating of men raw, are to have something of the divine.

Lucretius does not hesitate to say that nature has degenerated (lib. II.
v. 1159). Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote
antiquity. Horace combats this prejudice with as much finesse as force
in his beautiful Epistle to Augustus (Epist. I. liv. ii.). "Must our
poems, then," he says, "be like our wines, of which the oldest are
always preferred?"

The learned and ingenious Fontenelle expresses himself on this subject
as follows:

"The whole question of the pre-eminence between the ancients and the
moderns, once it is well understood, is reduced to knowing whether the
trees which formerly were in our countryside were bigger than those of
to-day. In the event that they were, Homer, Plato, Demosthenes cannot
be equalled in these latter centuries.

"Let us throw light on this paradox. If the ancients had more intellect
than us, it is that the brains of those times were better ordered,
formed of firmer or more delicate fibres, filled with more animal
spirits; but in virtue of what were the brains of those times better
ordered? The trees also would have been bigger and more beautiful; for
if nature was then younger and more vigorous, the trees, as well as
men's brains, would have been conscious of this vigour and this youth."
("Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns," vol. 4, 1742 edition.)

With the illustrious academician's permission, that is not at all the
state of the question. It is not a matter of knowing whether nature has
been able to produce in our day as great geniuses and as good works as