gether an improvement on the terrestrial life to which I had been accustomed. Thus it happened that we often had conversations about the relative advantages of the aquatic and terrestrial modes of existence. He would wonder at my preference for our English ways, and would hold forth in something like the following strain:—
"If you consider the structure of the human body, you must allow that it is but ill-adapted for terrestrial life. The smooth hairless skin is so unfitted for exposure to the sun and air, that if you would go about in the air with any comfort, you must cover yourself from head to foot with clothes. Now, these clothes, with their ligatures and fastenings, never fit like the woolly or hairy covering of the brutes; they not only hinder the free play of your muscles, but they cramp and distort the body and limbs out of all their natural proportions. Your tailors, milliners, shoemakers and other providers of clothing have so acted on your frames that your bodies are squeezed in at the waist to the extent of deformity; the various organs of the body are displaced or impeded in their proper functions, and you suffer from innumerable diseases, all occasioned by the pressure of your weight of garments. Your feet are so cramped by the hard leather boots you wear, that the toes soon lose all their natural play, and put you to constant torture, owing to the callosities and distortions they contract from wearing such irrational coverings. Your hats, too, are the cause of perpetual head-aches, loss of hair and congestion of the brain. In short, clothes are the producers of so much misery and ill-health, that it is evident man was never intended by nature to wear them. And yet you cannot exist in the air without them!
