Ankles
Aorta
Teeth (if natural)
Shoulders
Windpipe
Lungs
Neck
Jugular vein
CLASS IV
Stomach (English)
Liver (American)
Solar plexus
Hips
Calves
Pleura
Nose
Feet (bare)
Shins
CLASS V
Teeth (if false)
Heels
Toes
Kidneys
Knees
Diaphragm
Thyroid gland
Legs (female)
Scalp
CLASS VI
Thighs
Paunch
Oesophagus
Spleen
Pancreas
Gall-bladder
Cæcum
I made two more classes, VII and VIII, but they entered into anatomical
details impossible of discussion in a book designed to be read aloud at
the domestic hearth. Perhaps I shall print them in the _Medical Times_
at some future time. As my classes stand, they present mysteries enough.
Why should the bronchial tubes (Class II) be so much lordlier than the
lungs (Class III) to which they lead? And why should the oesophagus
(Class VI) be so much _less_ lordly than the stomach (Class II in the
United States, Class IV in England) to which _it_ leads? And yet the
fact in each case is known to us all. To have a touch of bronchitis is
almost fashionable; to have pneumonia is merely bad luck. The stomach,
at least in America, is so respectable that it dignifies even
seasickness, but I have never heard of any decent man who ever had any
trouble with his oesophagus.
If you wish a short cut to a strange organ's standing, study its
diseases. Generally speaking, they are sure indices. Let us imagine a
problem: What is the relative respectability of the hair and the scalp,
close neighbors, offspring of the same osseous tissue? Turn to baldness
and dandruff, and you have your answer. To be bald is no more than a
genial jocosity, a harmless foible--but to have dandruff is almost as
bad as to have beri-beri. Hence the fact that the hair is in Class I,
while the scalp is at the bottom of Class V. So again and again. To
break one's collar-bone (Class II) is to be in harmony with the nobility
and gentry; to crack one's shin (Class IV) is merely vulgar. And what a
difference between having one's tonsils cut out (Class II) and getting a
new set of false teeth (Class V)!
Wherefore? Why? To what end? Why is the stomach so much more respectable
(even in England) than the spleen; the liver (even in America) than the
pancreas; the windpipe than the oesophagus; the pleura than the
diaphragm? Why is the collar-bone the undisputed king of the osseous
frame? One can understand the supremacy of the heart: it plainly bosses
the whole vascular system. But why do the bronchial tubes wag the lungs?
Why is the chin superior to the nose? The ankles to the shins? The solar
plexus to the gall-bladder?
I am unequal to the penetration of this great ethical, æsthetical and
sociological mystery. But in leaving it, let me point to another and
antagonistic one: to wit, that which concerns those viscera of the lower
animals that we use for food. The kidneys in man are far down the
scale--far down in Class V, along with false teeth, the scalp and the
female leg. But the kidneys of the beef steer, the calf, the sheep, or
whatever animal it is whose kidneys we eat--the kidneys of this creature
are close to the borders of Class I. What is it that young Capt. Lionel
Basingstoke, M.P., always orders when he drops in at Gatti's on his way
from his chambers in the Albany to that flat in Tyburnia where Mrs.
Vaughn-Grimsby is waiting for him to rescue her from her _cochon_ of a
husband? What else but deviled kidneys? Who ever heard of a gallant
young English seducer who didn't eat deviled kidneys--not now and then,
not only on Sundays and legal holidays, but every day, every evening?
Again, and by way of postscript No. 2, concentrate your mind upon
sweetbreads. Sweetbreads are made in Chicago of the pancreases of horned
cattle. From Portland to Portland they belong to the first class of
refined delicatessen. And yet, on the human plane, the pancreas is in
Class VI, along with the cæcum and the paunch. And, contrariwise, there
is tripe--"the stomach of the ox or of some other ruminant." The stomach
of an American citizen belongs to Class II, and even the stomach of an
Englishman is in Class IV, but tripe is far down in Class VIII. And
chitterlings--the excised vermiform appendix of the cow. Of all the
towns in Christendom, Richmond, Va., is the only one wherein a
self-respecting white man would dare to be caught wolfing a chitterling
in public.
_XI.--THE JAZZ WEBSTER_
_XI. The Jazz Webster_
ACTOR. One handicapped more by a wooden leg than by a wooden head.
ADULTERY. Democracy applied to love.
ALIMONY. The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
ANTI-VIVISECTIONIST. One who gags at a guinea-pig and swallows a baby.
ARCHBISHOP. A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained
by Christ.
ARGUMENT. A means of persuasion. The agents of argumentation under a
democracy, in the order of their potency, are (_a_) whiskey, (_b_) beer,
(_c_) cigars, (_d_) tears.
AXIOM. Something that everyone believes. When everyone begins to believe
anything it ceases to be true. For example, the notion that the
homeliest girl in the party is the safest.
BALLOT BOX. The altar of democracy. The cult served upon it is the
worship of jackals by jackasses.
BREVITY. The quality that makes cigarettes, speeches, love affairs and
ocean voyages bearable.
CELEBRITY. One who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
CHAUTAUQUA. A place in which persons who are not worth talking to listen
to that which is not worth hearing.
CHRISTIAN. One who believes that God notes the fall of a sparrow and is
shocked half to death by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent; one
who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. The theory that, since the sky rockets following a
wallop in the eye are optical delusions, the wallop itself is a delusion
and the eye another.
CHURCH. A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag
about it to persons who will never get there.
CIVILIZATION. A concerted effort to remedy the blunders and check the
practical joking of God.
CLERGYMAN. A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
CONSCIENCE. The inner voice which warns us that someone is looking.
CONFIDENCE. The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one
knows that one would lie in his place.
COURTROOM. A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be
equals, with the betting odds in favor of Judas.
CREATOR. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh. Three proofs of
His humor: democracy, hay fever, any fat woman.
DEMOCRACY. The theory that two thieves will steal less than one, and
three less than two, and four less than three, and so on _ad infinitum_;
the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to
get it good and hard.
EPIGRAM. A platitude with vine-leaves in its hair.
EUGENICS. The theory that marriages should be made in the laboratory;
the Wassermann test for love.
EVIL. That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of
others, but it is seldom a mistake.
EXPERIENCE. A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something,
to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.
FAME. An embalmer trembling with stage-fright.
FINE. A bribe paid by a rich man to escape the lawful penalty of his
crime. In China such bribes are paid to the judge personally; in America
they are paid to him as agent for the public. But it makes no difference
to the men who pay them--nor to the men who can't pay them.
FIRMNESS. A form of stupidity; proof of an inability to think the same
thing out twice.
FRIENDSHIP. A mutual belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks,
hobgoblins and imbecilities.
GENTLEMAN. One who never strikes a woman without provocation; one on
whose word of honor the betting odds are at least 1 to 2.
HAPPINESS. Peace after effort, the overcoming of difficulties, the
feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are
married women and single men.
HELL. A place where the Ten Commandments have a police force behind
them.
HISTORIAN. An unsuccessful novelist.
HONEYMOON. The time during which the bride believes the bridegroom's
word of honor.
HOPE. A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
HUMANITARIAN. One who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's
children devoured by wolves.
HUSBAND. One who played safe and is now played safely. A No. 16 neck in
a No. 15½ collar.
HYGIENE. Bacteriology made moral; the theory that the Italian in the
ditch should be jailed for spitting on his hands.
IDEALIST. One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage,
concludes that it will also make better soup.
IMMORALITY. The morality of those who are having a better time. You will
never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not
dreadfully immoral.
IMMORTALITY. The condition of a dead man who doesn't believe that he is
dead.
JEALOUSY. The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.
JUDGE. An officer appointed to mislead, restrain, hypnotize, cajole,
seduce, browbeat, flabbergast and bamboozle a jury in such a manner that
it will forget all the facts and give its decision to the best lawyer.
The objection to judges is that they are seldom capable of a sound
professional judgment of lawyers. The objection to lawyers is that the
best are the worst.
JURY. A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their
hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
LAWYER. One who protects us against robbers by taking away the
temptation.
LIAR. (_a_) One who pretends to be very good; (_b_) one who pretends to
be very bad.
LOVE. The delusion that one woman differs from another.
LOVE-AT-FIRST-SIGHT. A labor-saving device.
LOVER. An apprentice second husband; victim No. 2 in the larval stage.
MISOGYNIST. A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
MARTYR. The husband of a woman with the martyr complex.
MORALITY. The theory that every human act must be either right or wrong,
and that 99% of them are wrong.
MUSIC-LOVER. One who can tell you offhand how many sharps are in the key
of C major.
OPTIMIST. The sort of man who marries his sister's best friend.
OSTEOPATH. One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure
of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory is to be found
in the heads of those who believe it.
PASTOR. One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that
virtue doesn't pay.
PATRIOTISM. A variety of hallucination which, if it seized a
bacteriologist in his laboratory, would cause him to report the
streptococcus pyogenes to be as large as a Newfoundland dog, as
intelligent as Socrates, as beautiful as Mont Blanc and as respectable
as a Yale professor.
PENSIONER. A kept patriot.
PLATITUDE. An idea (_a_) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and
(_b_) that is not true.
POLITICIAN. Any citizen with influence enough to get his old mother a
job as charwoman in the City Hall.
POPULARITY. The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of
their wives and women complain of their husbands.
POSTERITY. The penalty of a faulty technique.
PROGRESS. The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers,
the vermiform appendix and God.
PROHIBITIONIST. The sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with, even if
he drank.
PSYCHOLOGIST. One who sticks pins into babies, and then makes a chart
showing the ebb and flow of their yells.
PSYCHOTHERAPY. The theory that the patient will probably get well
anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.
QUACK. A physician who has decided to admit it.
REFORMER. A hangman signing a petition against vivisection.
REMORSE. Regret that one waited so long to do it.
SELF-RESPECT. The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
SOB. A sound made by women, babies, tenors, fashionable clergymen,
actors and drunken men.
SOCIALISM. The theory that John Smith is better than his superiors.
SUICIDE. A belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's
relatives.
SUNDAY. A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
SUNDAY SCHOOL. A prison in which children do penance for the evil
conscience of their parents.
SURGEON. One bribed heavily by the patient to take the blame for the
family doctor's error in diagnosis.
TEMPTATION. An irresistible force at work on a movable body.
THANKSGIVING DAY. A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism
to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.
THEOLOGY. An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms
of the not worth knowing.
TOMBSTONE. An ugly reminder of one who has been forgotten.
TRUTH. Something somehow discreditable to someone.
UNIVERSITY. A place for elevating sons above the social rank of their
fathers. In the great American universities men are ranked as follows:
1. Seducers; 2. Fullbacks; 3. Booze-fighters; 4. Pitchers and Catchers;
5. Poker players; 6. Scholars; 7. Christians.
VERDICT. The _a priori_ opinion of that juror who smokes the worst
cigars.
VERS LIBRE. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to
read.
WART. Something that outlasts ten thousand kisses.
WEALTH. Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of
one's wife's sister's husband.
WEDDING. A device for exciting envy in women and terror in men.
WIFE. One who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
WIDOWER. One released on parole.
WOMAN. Before marriage, an _agente provocateuse_; after marriage, a
_gendarme_.
WOMEN'S CLUB. A place in which the validity of a philosophy is judged by
the hat of its prophetess.
YACHT CLUB. An asylum for landsmen who would rather die of drink than be
seasick.
_XII.--THE OLD SUBJECT_
_XII.--The Old Subject_
§ 1.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry
later. For another thing, they die earlier.
§ 2.
The man who marries for love alone is at least honest. But so was
Czolgosz.
§ 3.
When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.
§ 4.
In the year 1830 the average American had six children and one wife. How
time transvalues all values!
§ 5.
Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
§ 6.
A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames
the door he walks into in the dark.
§ 7.
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's is that when it is
dead it stays dead.
§ 8.
Definition of a good mother: one who loves her child almost as much as a
little girl loves her doll.
§ 9.
The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little bit jealous. The way
to lose him is to keep him a little bit more jealous.
§ 10.
It used to be thought in America that a woman ceased to be a lady the
moment her name appeared in a newspaper. It is no longer thought so, but
it is still true.
§ 11.
Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation
of children in arms and men in love.
§ 12.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are
giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
§ 13.
How little it takes to make life unbearable!... A pebble in the shoe, a
cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh!
§ 14.
The bride at the altar: "At last! At last!" The bridegroom: "Too late!
Too late!"
§ 15.
The best friend a woman can have is the man who has got over loving her.
He would rather die than compromise her.
§ 16.
The one breathless passion of every woman is to get some one married. If
she's single, it's herself. If she's married, it's the woman her husband
would probably marry if she died tomorrow.
§ 17.
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon. Woman, that she was born so
long ago.
§ 18.
Woman is at once the serpent, the apple--and the belly-ache.
§ 19.
Cold mutton-stew; a soiled collar; breakfast in dress clothes; a wet
house-dog, over-affectionate; the other fellow's tooth-brush; an echo of
"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"; the damp, musty smell of an empty house; stale
beer; a mangy fur coat; _Katzenjammer_; false teeth; the criticism of
Hamilton Wright Mabie; boiled cabbage; a cocktail _after_ dinner; an old
cigar butt; ... the kiss of Evelyn after the inauguration of Eleanor.
§ 20.
Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or
at a man.
§ 21.
The worst man hesitates when choosing a mother for his children. And
hesitating, he is lost.
§ 22.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from
experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
§ 23.
No man is ever too old to look at a woman, and no woman is ever too fat
to hope that he will look.
§ 24.
Bachelors have consciences. Married men have wives.
§ 25.
Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't they'd
be married, too.
§ 26.
Man is a natural polygamist. He always has one woman leading him by the
nose and another hanging on to his coat-tails.
§ 27.
All women, soon or late, are jealous of their daughters; all men, soon
or late, are envious of their sons.
§ 28.
History seems to bear very harshly upon women. One cannot recall more
than three famous women who were virtuous. But on turning to famous men
the seeming injustice disappears. One would have difficulty finding
even two of them who were virtuous.
§ 29.
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
§ 30.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month
before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and
you will have the truth about him in a very handy form.
§ 31.
The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are
just as easy to fool.
§ 32.
The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other
fellow married her.
§ 33.
A man may be a fool and not know it--but not if he is married.
§ 34.
All men are proud of their own children. Some men carry egoism so far
that they are even proud of their own wives.
§ 35.
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or
gain one wife and one friend.
§ 36.
Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.
§ 37.
He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
§ 38.
A bachelor is one who wants a wife, but is glad he hasn't got her.
§ 40.
Women usually enjoy annoying their husbands, but not when they annoy
them by growing fat.
_XIII.--PANORAMAS OF PEOPLE_
_XIII.--Panoramas of People_
_I.--Men_
Fat, slick, round-faced men, of the sort who haunt barber shops and are
always having their shoes shined. Tall, gloomy, Gothic men, with
eyebrows that meet over their noses and bunches of black, curly hair in
their ears. Men wearing diamond solitaires, fraternal order watchcharms,
golden elks' heads with rubies for eyes. Men with thick, loose lips and
shifty eyes. Men smoking pale, spotted cigars. Men who do not know what
to do with their hands when they talk to women. Honorable, upright,
successful men who seduce their stenographers and are kind to their dear
old mothers. Men who allow their wives to dress like chorus girls.
White-faced, scared-looking, yellow-eyed men who belong to societies for
the suppression of vice. Men who boast that they neither drink nor
smoke. Men who mop their bald heads with perfumed handkerchiefs. Men
with drawn, mottled faces, in the last stages of arterio-sclerosis.
Silent, stupid-looking men in thick tweeds who tramp up and down the
decks of ocean steamers. Men who peep out of hotel rooms at Swedish
chambermaids. Men who go to church on Sunday morning, carrying Oxford
Bibles under their arms. Men in dress coats too tight under the arms.
Tea-drinking men. Loud, back-slapping men, gabbling endlessly about
baseball players. Men who have never heard of Mozart. Tired business men
with fat, glittering wives. Men who know what to do when children are
sick. Men who believe that any woman who smokes is a prostitute. Yellow,
diabetic men. Men whose veins are on the outside of their noses. Now and
then a clean, clear-eyed, upstanding man. Once a week or so a man with
good shoulders, straight legs and a hard, resolute mouth....
_II.--Women_
Fat women with flabby, double chins. Moon-faced, pop-eyed women in
little flat hats. Women with starchy faces and thin vermilion lips.
Man-shy, suspicious women, shrinking into their clothes every time a
wet, caressing eye alights upon them. Women soured and robbed of their
souls by Christian Endeavor. Women who would probably be members of the
Lake Mohonk Conference if they were men. Gray-haired, middle-aged,
waddling women, wrecked and unsexed by endless, useless parturition,
nursing, worry, sacrifice. Women who look as if they were still innocent
yesterday afternoon. Women in shoes that bend their insteps to
preposterous semi-circles. Women with green, barbaric bangles in their
ears, like the concubines of Arab horse-thieves. Women looking in
show-windows, wishing that their husbands were not such poor sticks.
Shapeless women lolling in six thousand dollar motorcars. Trig little
blondes, stepping like Shetland ponies. Women smelling of musk,
ambergris, bergamot. Long-legged, cadaverous, hungry women. Women eager
to be kidnapped, betrayed, forced into marriage at the pistol's point.
Soft, pulpy, pale women. Women with ginger-colored hair and large,
irregular freckles. Silly, chattering, gurgling women. Women showing
their ankles to policemen, chauffeurs, street-cleaners. Women with
slim-shanked, whining, sticky-fingered children dragging after them.
Women marching like grenadiers. Yellow women. Women with red hands.
Women with asymmetrical eyes. Women with rococo ears. Stoop-shouldered
women. Women with huge hips. Bow-legged women. Appetizing women.
Good-looking women....
_III.--Babies_
Babies smelling of camomile tea, cologne water, wet laundry, dog soap,
_Schmierkase_. Babies who appear old, disillusioned and tired of life at
six months. Babies that cry "Papa!" to blushing youths of nineteen or
twenty at church picnics. Fat babies whose earlobes turn out at an angle
of forty-five degrees. Soft, pulpy babies asleep in perambulators, the
sun shining straight into their faces. Babies gnawing the tails of
synthetic dogs. Babies without necks. Pale, scorbutic babies of the
third and fourth generation, damned because their grandfathers and
great-grandfathers read Tom Paine. Babies of a bluish tinge, or with
vermilion eyes. Babies full of soporifics. Thin, cartilaginous babies
that stretch when they are lifted. Warm, damp, miasmatic babies.
Affectionate, ingratiating, gurgling babies: the _larvæ_ of life
insurance solicitors, fashionable doctors, Episcopal rectors, dealers in
Mexican mine stock, hand-shakers, Sunday-school superintendents. Hungry
babies, absurdly sucking their thumbs. Babies with heads of thick,
coarse black hair, seeming to be toupees. Unbaptized babies, dedicated
to the devil. Eugenic babies. Babies that crawl out from under tables
and are stepped on. Babies with lintels, grains of corn or shoe-buttons
up their noses, purple in the face and waiting for the doctor or the
embalmer. A few pink, blue-eyed, tight-skinned, clean-looking babies,
smiling upon the world....
_XIV.--HOMEOPATHICS_
_XIV.--Homeopathics_
1.
_Scene Infernal._
During a lull in the uproar of Hell two voices were heard.
"My name," said one, "was Ludwig van Beethoven. I was no ordinary
musician. The Archduke Rudolph used to speak to me on the streets of
Vienna."
"And mine," said the other, "was the Archduke Rudolph. I was no ordinary
archduke. Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated a trio to me."
2.
_The Eternal Democrat._
A Socialist, carrying a red flag, marched through the gates of Heaven.
"To Hell with rank!" he shouted. "All men are equal here."
Just then the late Karl Marx turned a corner and came into view,
meditatively stroking his whiskers. At once the Socialist fell upon his
knees and touched his forehead to the dust.
"O Master!" he cried. "O Master, Master!"
3.
_The School of Honor._
A trembling young reporter stood in the presence of an eminent city
editor.
"If I write this story," said the reporter, "it will rob a woman of her
good name."
"If you don't write it," said the city editor, "I'll give you a kick in
the pantaloons."
Next day the young reporter got a raise in salary and the woman
swallowed two ounces of permanganate of potassium.
4.
_Proposed Plot For a Modern Novel._