Life — November 24, 1887 — page 7: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

> LIFE: HOW THE SITE OF EDEN. ANY respectable old ladies of Charleston will be surprised and shocked to hear that a Southern Bishop writes to the Christian Advocate asserting that the city of Charles- ton was the original home of that highly reprehensible, ill-dressed couple, Adam and Eve, The Bishop's points are well taken, but in the interest of the Northern land movement I think it quite necessary to state my belief that the Bishop is in error. It is purely sectional feeling that leads me to op- pose the Bishop's theories, I have no particular interest in the exact location of the Garden of Eden, but, as a true Republican, who sent a substitute to the bloody war of the Rebellion, who laid down another man's leg that the stars and stripes might forever float over the land of the free and the home of the brave, I do not wish to see the solid South get a grip upon the home of my ancestors. Bishop Keener’s chief argument is that in and near the Cooper and Ashley rivers there is a vast collection of the remains of the largest mammals, remarkable for their variety ; very huge, very many, and evidently of many distinct species, Now, it is absurd to endeavor to clinch such a theory by means of a mammalian grave-yard. The Southern people accuse us Northern- ers of eternally waving the gory habiliment, of ha issues, and yet the first argument of their spokesman in this Garden- of-Eden controversy, resurrects the bones of a long-forgotten race, whose chief claim to distinction was the possession of a backbone. We can best hurl the Bishop's argument back into his teeth by calling his attention to Grover Cleveland, a man born and bred in New York, as well furnished in the matter of aggressive spinality as any one of the very huge and very many relics in the neighborhood about Charles- HE CAME TO SWEAR OFF. As well say that Buffalo is the Garden of Eden, and that Niagara is but the subsidence of the Deluge, because the President of the United States once infested that region, as assert that the remains of a primeval clambake or antediluvian bone-boiling estab- lishment conclusively proves that Adam and Eve were inhabitants of Charleston, . ‘What has the reverend gentleman to say to the fashions which pre- vailed within Eden’s gates as bearing upon this question ? If we areto judge from the evidence of the present day, I have only to request my opponent to attend an opera at the Metropolitan Opera House. He will see that there which will at once set his mind on a train of thought which leads to the inevitable conclusion that Eve set the fashion for New York, and it is an indisputable fact that no New York girl or matron ever took her styles from Charleston or any other city this side of London. In the matter of the Ark, which Bishop Keener thinks was built of the wood of the long-leaf pine of the Carolinas, 1 have only to say that there is just as much reason for saying that Gopher wood was but-a species of the late Fernando Wood as for asserting that it was the Carolina pine, and no more foolish theory than the Fernando Wood hypothesis could be imagined by mortal man in his sane hours. Yet, if the Ark were built of Fernando Wood, the Garden of Eden would have existed in New York city, according to Bishop Keener’s method of reasoning, and the Central Park would have been a tautological redundancy, which it is not. Again, if we are to judge by evidence before our eyes, there is every reason to believe that the designer of the Ark was from some- where down East, Burgess certainly comes from there, and I fail to see why Burgess is not as good evidence that Noah was. a Bostonian as an old whale’s tooth or the wish-bone of a behemoth is of Adam's being a secessionist. Go to, Bishop, go to—I won't say where to, if you will only go. Your arguments are as empty as Eden was after the inhabitants sought other climes. The fact is that since Ignatius Donnelly came along, comicbooks.com