PREFACE. Ixxvu 



And when he lays it down dogmatically, and applies it^ not to any 

 remote period, hut to his own time, and fays, 



JEtas parentum, pejor avis tultt^ 

 Nos Tjcquiores mox daturos 

 Progeniem vitlofiorem. 



That Solinus muft have lied (for he could not have been mif- 

 taken) when he fays, that in his time fcarce any man was born of 

 the fize of his parents*. And another very much later Author^ 

 Johannes Baptifta Porta, who wrote in the beginning of the laft 

 century, muft have lied alfo, for no reafon that I can imagine, when 

 he gives fuch an account of the fize of the people in Europe in his time f , 

 And laftly, when we join to all thofe teftimonies the authority of Mofes^ 

 who, fetting afide his infpiration, and confidering him merely as an 

 hiftorian, is the moft accurate of all hiftorians with refpe£l to genealo- 

 gies, and the length of generations, and who is fupported (if he needed 

 any fupport) in what he fays of the long lives of the anceftors of his 

 nation, both before and after the flood, by the tefiimony of feveral hea- 

 then writers, can we believe that men have been always the fame in all 

 ages and nations, without rejedling the authority of all hiftory, both 

 facred and profane, as well as the opinions of Philofophers and 

 men of Letters ? 



Laftly, It is to be confidered whether the degeneracy muft not have 

 gone on ftill fafter in modern times, by means of vices and difeafes^ 

 unknown in the antient World ? And w^hether, upon the whole, 

 there be not good reafon to believe, that man is not deftined by God- 

 and nature to be always on this earth, at leaft in the fame ftate he is 

 now in ; but that the fpecies, after running a certain courfc, is doomed^ 

 like the individual, firft to decline and decay, and then pafs inta 

 another ftate. 



This pidure, it will be faid, of the prefent ftate of mankind, is a 



moft melancholy one. But we muft know the difeafe before we 



can 

 * See page 156 of this Volume^ "^ Ibid, page 15S, 



