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 terranean thunder: I perceive the degeneracy: of your race by the smallness of your little finger! videlicet, the pickaxe. This, to be sure, is a fiction, but it shows the prevalent opinion—the feeling—the conviction—of absolute, universal, irremediable deterioration."

"I should be sorry," said Mr. Foster, "that such an opinion should become universal, independently of my conviction of its fallacy. Its general admission would tend, in a great measure, to produce the very evils it appears to lament. What could be its effect, but to check the ardour of investigation, to extinguish the zeal of philanthropy, to freeze the current of enterprising hope, to bury in the torpor of scepticism and in the stagnation of despair, every better faculty of the human mind, which will necessarily become retrograde in ceasing to be progressive?"

"I am inclined to think, on the contrary,"