same marriage do not) must certainly in the poet’s words, give us pause.
Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for whatever
she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law of anticipation
by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken up their residence
(modern science has conclusively shown that only the plasmic substance can
be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an increasingly earlier stage of
development, an arrangement, which, though productive of pain to some of
our feelings (notably the maternal) is nevertheless, some of us think, in the long
run beneficial to the race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest.
Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be called an interruption?) that
an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and apparently pass
through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect imperturbability such
multifarious aliments as cancrenous femoules emaciated by parturition, corpulent
professional gentlemen, not to speak of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns
might possibly find gastric relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals
as nought else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to.
For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately acquainted with the
minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and embryo
philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things scientific
can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides himself on being, it should
perhaps be stated that staggering bob in the vile parlance of our lower class
licensed victuallers signifies the cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly
dropped from its mother. In a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom
(Pubb. Canv.) which took place in the commons’ hall of the National Maternity
Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne
(Lic. in Mdw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported
by eyewitnesses as having stated that once a woman has let the cat into the
bag (an esthetic allusion, presumably, to one of the most complicated and
marvellous of all nature’s processes, the act of sexual congress) she must let it
out again or give it life, as he phrased it, to save her own. At the risk of her
own was the telling rejoinder of his interlocutor none the less effective for the
moderate and measured tone in which it was delivered.
Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and now she was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone before, are happy