Читать книгу Terrible Tractoration, and Other Poems онлайн

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Can take a wicked ugly tyke,

And every organ we dislike

Pull out or drive in, at a venture,

Thus change each bump to an indenture.

Protuberant destructiveness,

Placed in our phrenologic press,

Is render’d, by its power immense,

Exuberant benevolence.

In infancy, in half a trice,

We thus extinguish every vice,

Before it has had time to harden,

As easily as weed a garden.

We keep fine faculties ready made,

Thus beat dame Nature at her trade

Of manufacturing mental powers,

For hers are not half up to ours.

We make a thing we call Nousometer,

Or Phrenological Micrometer;

The grand quintessence of inventions

For measuring the mind’s dimensions.

This shows men’s vices and propensities,

Their aggravations and intensities,

By marks indelible, and plain-

Ly legible as that on Cain.

Nousometers, our hope and trust is,

Will supersede our courts of justice,

By proving guilt in all gradations,

In style of Euclid’s demonstrations.

To crown our cheap mode of conviction

By ready punishment’s infliction,

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