176 GLAUCUS; OR, 
to right the wrong which man’s ignorance had 
begotten, and drank in, day by day, the poisoned 
atmosphere, and formed it into fair green leaves, and 
breathed into the children’s faces from every pore, 
whenever they bent over it, the life-giving oxygen 
for which their dulled blood and festered lungs were 
craving in vain; fulfilling God’s will itself, though 
man would not, too careless or too covetous to see, 
after thousands of years of boasted progress, why 
God had covered the earth with grass, herb, and 
tree, a living and life-giving garment of perpetual 
health and youth. 
It is too sad to think long about, lest we become 
very Heraclituses. Let us take the other side of the 
matter with Democritus, try to laugh man out of 
a little of his boastful ignorance and self-satisfied 
clumsiness, and tell him, that if the House of Com- 
mons would but summon one of the little Paramecia 
from any Thames’ sewer-mouth, to give his evidence 
before their next Cholera Committee, sanitary blue- 
books, invaluable as they are, would be superseded 
for ever and a day; and sanitary reformers would no 
