The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, April, 1862

'These crawlers,' for instance, 'should they be still here,'
'Not yet become bipeds?' The answer is clear:

In our strangely unequal organic advance,
He is the most forward who has the best chance.
By braving the weather and struggling with brother,
The one who survives it all gains upon t'other.

The old Bible 'myth,' now, of Jacob and Esau,
Is the struggle 'twixt species, the monkey and man law;
One hairy, one handsome, one favored, one cursed;
And sometimes the last one turns out to be first.

Still, through cycles enough let the laggard persist,
Let the weak be suppressed since he can not resist,
And, proceeding by logic which none may dispute,
Can't we safely infer there's an end to the brute?

You may, if you please, supersede Revelation,
By wholly new methods of ratiocination;
Though, since head and heart need be in contradiction,
Why should reason hold faith under any restriction?
Shut your eyes, and guess down heaven's good pious fiction.[16 - Don't speak of quacks; just take your dose;Why should you try to mend it,If Doctor H– concocts the pill,And Parsons recommend it?See Amer. Jour. of Sci., Vol. xxx., 2d Scr., pages 10-12.]

Noah's ark was superfluous. Where were his brains,
For those beasts and those sons to provide with such pains,
When they might to a deluge cry Fiddle di dee,
And sprout fins and scales, if they took to the sea?

Well, perhaps in those days they had not yet known
That by need of new functions new organs are grown.
Those drowned chaps were sure a 'degenerate' crew,
Or else, on their plunge into element new,
Some 'law of selection' had rescued a few.
And, 'if wishes were fishes' I think one or two
Would have wished, and swam out of their scrape, do not you?
Can it be that those 'Fish Tales' of mermen are true?

No wonder that racing was always in fashion,—
All orders of beings were born with the passion—
But it seems that at length Genus Man will be winner.
You cry 'Lucky dog!' But what now about dinner?

No oysters, no turtle, fresh salmon, fried sole,
No canvas duck nor fowl casserole.
All these he has seen disappear from the stage,
A sacrifice vast growing age after age.

Their successive growth upward he's watched with dismay;
They have come to be men, having all had their day!
Though he took, while its lord, quite a taste of the creature,
By rule Epicurean 'dum vivim.,' etcetera.

In Paradise, Adam and Eve, to be sure,
Since they didn't have flesh, ate their onion sauce pure,
But, as our old friend John P. Robinson he
Said, 'they didn't know everything down in Judee.'

Now the better taught modern he very well knows
What to beef and to mutton society owes.
What are homes without hearths? What's a hearth without roasts?
Or a grand public dinner with nothing but toasts?

Yet, what government measure, or scheme philanthropic,
Or learned convention in hall philosophic,
But is mainly sustained upon leasts and collations?
At least, it is so in all civilized nations.

Here's a fix! Yet indeed, soon or late, the whole race
Must the problem decide on, with good or ill grace.
We cannot go hungry; what are we to do?
Shall we pulse it, like Daniel, that knowing young Jew?
Letting Grahamite doctors our diet appoint,
Eat our very plain pudding without any joint?

Or, shall we the bloody alternative take,
And cannibal meals of our relatives make,
Put aside ancient scruples (for what's in a name?)
And shake hands with the dainty New Zealander dame,
Who thought that she really might relish a bit
Of broiled missionary brought fresh from the spit?

'Twere surely most cruel in Nature our nurse,
Man's march of improvement so quick to reverse.
Will she offer a choice which we may not refuse,
When we're sure to turn savage however we choose?

We may slowly creep up to a lofty position,
Then go back at one leap to the lower condition.
Even so, my good friend, in a circle he goes,
Who would follow such theories on to their close.
If you've started with Darwin, as sure as you're born,
You're in a dilemma; pray take either horn.

    T.
Who has not belonged in his time to a debating society? What youth ambitious of becoming 'a perfect Hercules behind the bar?'—as a well meaning but unfortunate Philadelphian once said in a funeral eulogy over a deceased legal friend—has not 'debated' in a club 'formed for purposes of mutual and literary improvement of the mind?' All who have will read with pleasure the following letter from one who has most certainly been there:—

DEAR CONTINENTAL:

I am a man that rides around over the 'kedn'try.' In the little village where I am now tarrying, the school-house bell is ringing to call together the members of that ancient institution peculiar to villages, the debating society. A friend informs me that the time-honored questions—Should capital punishment be abolished?—Did Columbus deserve more praise than Washington?—Is art more pleasing to the eye than nature?—have each had their turn in their regular rotation, and that the question for to-night is—as you might suppose—Has the Indian suffered greater wrongs at the hands of the White man than the Negro? As I have a distinct recollection of having thoroughly investigated and zealously declaimed on each of the above topics in days lang syne, I shall excuse myself from attendance this evening, on the ground that I am already extensively informed on the subject in hand, and my mind is fully made up. But I hereby acknowledge my indebtedness to the good fellow who told me the object of the ringing of the bell—for he has unconsciously started up some of the most amusing recollections of my life. Sitting here alone in my room, I have just taken a hearty laugh over a circumstance that had well-nigh given me the slip. The question was the same Negro-Indian-White-man affair. One of the orators, having, a long time previously, seen a picture in an old 'jography' of some Indians making a hubbub on board certain vessels, and reading under it, Destruction of Tea in Boston Harbor, brought up the circumstance, and insisting with great earnestness that the white man had received burning wrongs at the hands of the Indian, and that the latter had no reason at all to complain, dwelt with great emphasis on the ruthless destruction of the white man's tea in Boston Harbor by the latter, in proof of his 'point.'