“ ‘I understand,’ said I, ‘these pieces served as tickets both to them and their long posterity.’

“ ‘Who will collect these scraps,’ continued Plato, ‘and restore us Socrates’s robe?

“While he was uttering these words, I saw at a distance a child walking towards us in a slow but sure pace. He had a little head, slender body, weak arms and short legs: but all these parts increased in all dimensions, according as he came forward. In the progress of his successive growth, he appear’d to me under a hundred different forms; I saw him directing a long telescope towards the heavens, estimating the fall of bodies by means of a pendulum, determining the weight of the air by a tube fill’d with quicksilver, and discomposing light with a prism. He was now become an enormous Colossus: his head touch’d the heavens, his feet were lost in the abyss, and his arms reach’d from one to the other pole. With his right hand he brandished a torch, whose light spread a vast way in the sky, enlightened even the bottom of the waters, and penetrated into the entrails of the earth. I ask’d Plato, what that gigantic figure was, that was coming towards us.