ESSAY IX. 4415 limbs of mine, Therinaowe themselves entirely to the animal or vegetable food, to the roots or the stalks, to the leaves or the fruit of plants, or to the flesh of brute creatures which have past through my mouth for these fifty years, or the mouths of my parents before me : This hand would have been worn to a mere skeleton, my arms had been dry bones, and my trunk and ribs the statue of death, had they not all received perpetual recruits from the field. These lips which now address you, are of the same materials, and they were once growing like the grass of the earth. This very flesh which I call mine now, did belong to the sheep or the ox, before it was a part of me ; and it served to clothe their bones before it covered mine. You know, Theron, you are a gentleman who delight in rural sports when you reside at your country-seat, and you love to feast on the game that you have pursued. Did you ever suppose that any part of yourself was oncehurried through the air in the breast of a frighted par- tridge, which carne before night into your net? Or that any piece of you was ever driven through the fields before the full. mouthed hounds, on the legs of a hunted hare, which was the next day prepared for your table? Had you ever so strange a thought as this is ? And can you believe it now ? Or upon a survey of my argument, can you tell how to deny it ? And what are hares and partridges made of but growing herbage or shat- tered corn ? It is true, you have sometimes tasted of fish, either from the sea or the rivers, but even these in their original also are a sort of grass; they have been fed partly by sea weeds, and partly by lesser fish which they have devoured, whose prime and natural nourishment was from some vegetable matter in the watry world.. In short, sir, I am free to declare, that whether I have eaten cheese or butter, breador milk ; whether I hav e fed on theox or the sheep, or the fowls of the air, or the fish of the sea, I am certain that this body, and these limbs of mine, even to my teeth and nails, and the hairs of my head, are all borrowed originally from the vegetable creation. Every thing of me that is not a thinking power, that is not mind or spirit, was once growing like grass on the ground, or was made of the roots which sup- ported some green herbage. And now, Theron, what think you ofall these paradoxes? Which of them do you cavil at ? Which leaves you room for doubt or question ? Is not philosophy an entertaining study, that teaches us our original, and these astonishing operations of divine wisdom and providence ? But it teaches us also to have humble thoughts of ourselves, and to remember whence we came. Theron, to conclude the discourse, confessed his surprize and conviction ; he acknowledged the justice of Crito's whole arge-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=