"I have found out a gift for my fair; I know where the fossils abound, Where the footprints of _Aves_ declare The birds that once walked on the ground; Oh, come, and--in technical speech-- We'll walk this Devonian shore, Or on some Silurian beach We'll wander, my love, evermore.
I will show thee the sinuous track By the slow-moving Annelid made, Or the Trilobite that, farther back, In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid; Thou shalt see in his Jurassic tomb, The Plesiosaurus embalmed; In his Oolitic prime and his bloom Iguanodon safe and unharmed!
You wished--I remember it well, And I loved you the more for that wish-- For a perfect cystedian shell And a _whole_ holocephalic fish. And oh, if Earth's strata contains In its lowest Silurian drift, Or palæozoic remains The same--'tis your lover's free gift.
Then come, love, and never say nay, But calm all your maidenly fears; We'll note, love, in one summer's day The record of millions of years; And though the Darwinian plan Your sensitive feelings may shock, We'll find the beginning of man-- Our fossil ancestors, in rock!" --_Bret Harte._
"Will she thy linen wash and hosen darn?"--GAY.
"I'm utterly sick of this hateful alliance Which the ladies have formed with impractical Science! They put out their washing to learn hydrostatics, And give themselves airs for the sake of pneumatics.
They are knowing in muriate, and nitrate, and chlorine, While the stains gather fast on the walls and the flooring-- And the jellies and pickles fall woefully short, With their chemical use of the still and retort.
Our expenses increase (without drinking French wines), For they keep no accounts, with their tangents and sines?-- And to make both ends meet they give little assistance, With their accurate sense of the squares of the distance.
They can name every spot from Peru to El Arish, Except just the bounds of their own native parish; And they study the orbits of Venus and Saturn, While their home is resigned to the thief and the slattern.
Chronology keeps back the dinner two hours, The smoke-jack stands still while they learn motive powers; Flies and shells swallow up all our everyday gains, And our acres are mortgaged for fossil remains.
They cease to reflect with their talk of refraction-- They drive us from home by electric attraction-- And I'm sure, since they've bothered their heads with affinity I'm repulsed every hour from my learned divinity.