Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/81

Rh subsists with the same tails. From this time they seem to have communicated themselves only to those men, who retired from the converse of their own species to a more uninterrupted life of contemplation. I am much inclined to believe, that in the midst of those solitudes they instituted the so much celebrated order of gymnosophists. For whoever observes the scene and manner of their life, will easily find them to have imitated with all exactness imaginable the manners and customs of their masters and instructors. They are said to dwell in the thickest woods, to go naked, to suffer their bodies to be over-run with hair, and their nails to grow to a prodigious length. Plutarch says, "they eat what they could get in the fields, their drink was water, and their bed made of leaves or moss". And Herodotus tells us, that they esteemed it a great exploit to kill very many ants or creeping things.

Hence we see, that the two nations which contend for the origin of learning, are the same that have ever most abounded with this ingenious race. Though they have contested, which was first blest with the rise of science, yet have they conspired in being grateful to their common masters. Egypt is so well known to have worshipped them of old in their own images; and India may be credibly supposed to have done the same from that adoration, which they paid in latter times to the tooth of one of these hairy philosophers; in just gratitude, as it should seem, to the mouth, from which they received their knowledge.

Pass we now over into Greece: where we find Orpheus