| When the mighty brontosaurus
came striding into camp, she regarded it as an acquisition, I considered
it a calamity; that is a good sample of the lack of harmony that prevails
in our views of things. She wanted to domesticate it, I wanted to make it
a present of the homestead and move out. She believed it could be tamed
by kind treatment and would be a good pet; I said a pet twenty-one feet
high and eighty-four feet long would be no proper thing to have about the
place, because, even with the best intentions and without meaning any harm,
it could sit down on the house and mash it, for any one could see by the
look of its eye that it was absent-minded. - Eve's Diary |
 Illustration from first edition of EVE'S DIARY |
 Illustration from first edition of EVE'S DIARY |
As for the dinosaur--But Noah's
conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys
were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame
himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal,
and America had not then been discovered. - "Adam's Soliloquy" |
The less said about the pterodactyl the better. It was a spectacle, that beast!
a mixture of buzzard and alligator, a sarcasm, an affront to all animated nature,
a butt for the ribald jests of an unfeeling world. After some ages Nature perceived
that to put feathers on a reptile does not ennoble it, does not make it a bird,
but only a sham, a joke, a grotesque curiosity, a monster; also that there was
no useful thing for the pterodactyl to do, and nothing likely to turn up in
the future that could furnish it employment. And so she abolished it.
- "Flies and Russians," Fables of Man [available
from amazon.com]
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