Judge, 1912-06-08 · page 16 of 24
Judge — June 8, 1912 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous "nature lesson" mocking both animal facts and Victorian manners. The text presents deliberately absurd descriptions: beavers preferring baths (unlike the dirty "cat, small boy or tramp"), puns about tails and "detail," and jokes about Columbus and the Earth's shape. The embedded caricatures appear to show well-dressed gentlemen (possibly Gilded Age capitalists or politicians, identifiable by top hats) anthropomorphized as beavers engaged in dam-building—a likely metaphor for corporate monopolies or industrial manipulation of natural resources. The satire suggests wealthy men exploit nature (and labor) with calculated "sagacity" while the common man (the "small boy or tramp") lives uncouth and dirty. The author mocks overly serious "natural history" while critiquing class pretensions and rapacious industrialization disguised as civilized engineering.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
UNNATURAL HISTORY LESSONS. The Beaver. THe BEAVER is an aquatic representative of the mam- malian order Rodentia, although it is a question whether he fully appreciates the honor. He can be distin- guished from a cat, a small boy ora tramp by the fact that he is not afraid of taking a bath. When swimming he uses only his stern propellers, and steers with his tail. It would be cruel to de-tail a beaver, because then he would have to swim ina straight line entirely around the earth in order to get back to where he started from. (See Colum- bus’s theory of the shape of the earth.) Beavers are ex- pert civil engineers. They see a dam site quicker than many human beings, and then build their dam with super- human sagacity, locating their living quarters underneath. Like all sensible people, they leave their apartments in the spring and travel and visit relatives all summer. Their bill of fare consists of bark au naturel, bark maitre de dam and bark au gratin; also a dessert of water lily when it is in season. They shed their furs occasionally, with the aid of trappers’ skinning knives. These furs are genuine and command great figures. Made into coats, they are seen displaying all kinds of figures. The beaver is rarely shot, but is put out of business with a stick or caught inatrap. As he is hunted only at night, a night- stick is used. The class may now go to the country and find a beaver dam and watch the beavers beave. —C. G. Garretson,