OCR Text |
Show . MARK TWAIN ON "MAN" Man can't sleep out of doors without freezing to death or getting rheumatism: rheuma-tism: :he can't keep his nose under water over a minute without being drowned. He's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit inhab-it the earth. He has to lie coddled, swathed and bandaged to be able to live at all. He Is a rickety sort of thing any way you take him a regular Lrltlsh museum of inferiorities.. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine as unreliable as he Is would hare no market. The lower animals appear to us to get their teeth without pain and Inconvenience: Incon-venience: man's come through nfter months of cruel torture, at a time when he Is least able to bear it. As soon as he gets them they must be pulled out again. The second ' set will last for awhile, hut he will never get a set that he can depend' upon until the dentist makes one. Man starts In as a child and lives on diseases to the end ,as a regular diet. He has mumps, scarlet fever, whooping cough, croup, tonsilitls and dlptherla, as a matter of course. ..Afterwards, as he goes along,, his life continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma, carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain and a thousand other, maladies mal-adies of one sort and another. lie's Just-n basketful of pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes. Look at the workmanship of him in some particulars: What's his appendix for? It has no value. Its sole interest Is to He and wait for a stray grape seed and breed trouble. What Is his beard for? It is Just a nuisance. All nations persecute it with a razor. Nature, however, always keeps him supplied with It instead of putting It on his head. .o : A man wants to keep his hair. It Is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best protection against the weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubles, and half the lime nature puts it on so It won't stay. Man Isn't even handsome, and as for style, look at the Bengal tiger that Ideal of grace,' physical perfection and majesty ! Think of the Hon, the tiger and the leopard, then think of a man, that poor thing! The-animal of the wig, the ear trumpet, the glass eye, the porcelain teeth, the wooden leg. the silver windpipe wind-pipe a creature that Is mended, all from top to bottom. |