Why do humans have a horror of skeletons? Is this aversion justified? What does it signify?

Such are the animating questions of this essay by G. K. Chesterton, who acts as a witty defendant for humanity’s hidden form:

“Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty,” he writes, “we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression.”

This essay is one in a series titled ‘The Defendant’, first published as a collection in 1901, after the individual essays were published in The Speaker. Here, a selection of these essays has been reissued by Voices of Today for a new generation.