Читать книгу Terrible Tractoration, and Other Poems онлайн

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Have drawn nine million diagrams,

Which wags denominate flim flams,

Though worth your worshipful reliance

For shortest outlines of the science.

By dint of scientific thumps

Made famous phrenologic bumps,

And always found the effect was greater

Than when such bumps were made by nature.

Developements, thus manufactured,

Caused many a thick skull to be fractured

But pity well deserves defiance

When e’er she thwarts the march of science.

Thus Rousseau, Voltaire, Paine, and others,

Our revolutionizing brothers,

Got up French freedom’s cruel farces,

And made worse bumps than ours in masses.

And Godwin, too, in substance said,

Our bodies politic must be bled;

Man’s only mode of melioration

Is doctoring off one generation,—[16]

And substituting in its place

A spotless super-human race,

Pure as an unborn infant’s dream,

Of moonshine made, and moved by steam.

We have for sale the seeds of bumps,

Which, dibbled in the heads of gumps,

Take root without the aid of thumps

And grow as large as camels’ humps.