masterpieces_of_american_wit_and_humor.txt Part 6

"Here is one of them."

And Mrs. Middlerib felt ashamed of her feeble screams when Mr.

Middlerib threw up both arms and, with a howl that made the windows rattle, roared:

"Take him off! Oh, land of Scott, somebody take him off!"

And when the little honey-bee began tickling the sole of Mrs.

Middlerib's foot, she shrieked that the house was bewitched, and immediately went into spasms.

The household was aroused by this time. Miss Middlerib and Master Middlerib and the servants were pouring into the room, adding to the general confusion by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man a little on in years arrayed in a long night-s.h.i.+rt, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim, religious light of the night-lamp. And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the bottle for good measure and variety, and to keep the menagerie stirred up, had dried his legs and wings with a corner of the sheet, and after a preliminary circle or two around the bed to get up his motion and settle down to a working gait, he fired himself across the room, and to his dying day Mr. Middlerib will always believe that one of the servants mistook him for a burglar and shot him.

No one, not even Mr. Middlerib himself, could doubt that he was, at least for the time, most thoroughly cured of rheumatism. His own boy could not have carried himself more lightly or with greater agility.

But the cure was not permanent, and Mr. Middlerib does not like to talk about it.--_New York Weekly_.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

AN APHORISM AND A LECTURE

One of the boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons table- boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young fellows being always hungry----Allow me to stop dead short, in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank interior s.p.a.ces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a geode.

Aphorism by the Professor

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of high-water to suit a fis.h.i.+ng-party as to change these periods.

The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established. If the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.

--Excuse me--I return to my story of the Commons table. Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meager fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the boys to impale a slice of meat upon a fork at dinner time and stick the fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea time. The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last and kept a sharp lookout for missing forks--they knew where to find one if it was not in its place. Now the odd thing was that, after waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned a _second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pa.s.s through our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks, taking an active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your corporal being--do you suppose are whirled along like pebbles in a stream with the blood which warms your frame and colors your cheeks? A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer took him a _week_. You have, my full-grown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions five hundred and seventy thousand millions, errors excepted. Did I hear some gentleman say "Doubted"? I am the Professor; I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room if I do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have been saying and its bearing on what is now to come?

Listen, then. The number of these living elements in our body ill.u.s.trates the incalculable mult.i.tude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in the world of thought ill.u.s.trate those which we constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.

A Short Lecture on Phrenology

_Read to the Boarders at Our Breakfast Table _

I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a _pseudoscience_. A pseudoscience consists of a _nomenclature_, with a self-adjusting arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative practical application. Its professors and pract.i.tioners are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves. The believing mult.i.tude consists of women of both s.e.xes, feeble-minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses, philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others of this cla.s.s, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or a member of the detective police. I did not say that Phrenology was one of the pseudosciences.

A pseudoscience does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one. The pract.i.tioners of the pseudosciences know that common minds after they have been baited with a real fact or two, will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook. When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next out of our own imagination. (How many persons can read Judges XV. 16 correctly the first time?) The pseudosciences take advantage of this. I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.

I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was _something_ in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villainous low," and has a huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have as rarely met an unbiased and sensible man who really believed in the b.u.mps. It is observed, however, that persons with what the phrenologists call "good heads" are more p.r.o.ne than others toward plenary belief in the doctrine.

It is so hard to prove a negative that, if a man should a.s.sert that the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary, I might be puzzled. But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the caseous nature of our satellite before I purchase.

It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological statement. It is only necessary to show that its truth is not proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument. The walls of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over the smallest and most closely crowded "organs." Can you tell how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by kneading its k.n.o.bs with your fingers? So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of _Individuality_, _Size_, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of my strongbox and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill under this or that particular rivet. Perhaps there is; _only he doesn't know anything about it_. But this is a point that I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly, better than you do. The next argument you will all appreciate.

I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of Phrenology, which is _very similar_ to that of the pseudosciences. An example will show it most conveniently.

A-- is a notorious thief. Messrs. b.u.mpus and Crane examine him and find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness. Positive fact for Phrenology. Casts and drawings of A-- are multiplied, and the b.u.mp _does not lose_ in the act of copying--I did not say it gained.

--What do you look for so? (to the boarders).

Presently B-- turns up, a bigger thief than A--. But B-- has no b.u.mp at all over Acquisitiveness. Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.

Not a bit of it. Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?

_That's_ the reason B-- stole.

And then comes C--, ten times as much a thief as either A-- or B--; used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other way of committing petty larceny. Unfortunately C-- has a _hollow_, instead of a b.u.mp, over Acquisitiveness. Ah! but just look and see what a b.u.mp of Alimentiveness! Did not O-- buy nuts and gingerbread, when a boy, with the money he stole? Of course you see why he is a thief, and how his example confirms our n.o.ble science.

At last comes along a case which is apparently a _settler_, for there is a little brain with vast and varied powers--a case like that of Byron, for instance. Then comes out the grand reserve--reason which covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a phrenologist. "It is not the size alone, but the _quality_ of an organ, which determines its degree of power."

Oh! oh! I see. The argument may be briefly stated thus by the phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose." Well, that's convenient.

It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to the pseudosciences. I did not say it was a pseudoscience.

I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls. Of course, the Professor acquires his information solely through his cranial inspections and manipulations. What are you laughing at? (to the boarders). But let us just _suppose_, for a moment, that a tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece. Let us see how well he could get along without the "organs."

I will suppose myself to set up such a shop. I would invest one hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first customer--a middle-aged man. I look at him, ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:

SCALE FROM 1 TO 10

LIST OF FACULTIES FOR CUSTOMER--PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL: _Each to be accompanied with a wink._

Amativeness, 7 Most men love the conflicting s.e.x, and all men love to be told they do.

Alimentiveness, 8 Don't you see that he has burst off his lowest waistcoat b.u.t.ton with feeding--hey?

Acquisitiveness, 8 Of course. A middle-aged Yankee.

Approbativeness, 7+ Hat well brushed. Hair ditto. Mark the effect of that plus sign.

Self-esteem, 6 His face shows that.

Benevolence, 9 That'll please him.

Conscientiousness, 8 1/2 That fraction looks first rate.

Mirthfulness, 7 Has laughed twice since he came in. That sounds well.

Ideality, 9

Form, Size, Weight, Color, Locality, Eventuality, etc., Average everything that can't be guessed.

etc. (4 to 6)

And so of other faculties