40 THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL. 



But this has been barbarously parodied 

 by one of your own poets, in his famous 

 apostrophe of Oken's round 



"When naught is everything, and everything is 

 naught." 



Speaking, however, with the utmost 

 frankness, as I am sure all honest men 

 -would wish me to do, I am sorry to say one 

 of your great classical writers of the 19th 

 century has surpassed all the above- 

 mentioned authorities, whether it be Oken, 

 Lucretius, Moschus, or the Buddhist philoso- 

 pher, who can only go so far as " nothing," 

 in endeavouring to trace the origin of man 

 to the infusorial point, or to nothing ; for 

 De Quincey goes one step beyond, even to 

 that terra incognita " less than nothing." 

 And this he does in a very heart-rending, 

 sarcastic way, which I hope will not 

 disturb the feelings of any of the Profes- 

 sorial Fellows of the Royal Society whom I 

 have the honour to see before me. 



A Frenchman named Piron, the cynical 

 author of La Metromanie, having written 

 the following epitaph on himself 



