Life, 1904-10-13 · page 15 of 22
Life — October 13, 1904 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**"The Tortoise and the Hare"** (top illustration): This mocks Harvard's admission of a football player ("B—, Exeter's famous old tackle") who barely passed entrance exams. The satire suggests athletics distracted rather than aided his education—the "touchdown" joke plays on football terminology while questioning whether he actually learned anything. **"Malady"** (middle section): This satirizes the emerging medical tendency to pathologize human behavior. The piece wryly predicts that if "worry" becomes a treatable disease, doctors will soon claim that bad manners, modesty, and poor humor are also caused by germs—mocking the overreach of medical authority. **"Eternity Is a Long Time"** (bottom): A preacher's sermon illustration about hell's duration, using an absurd metaphor of a bird emptying the Atlantic into the Pacific drop-by-drop. The final joke (Pat and Mike dialogue) provides comic relief, contrasting theological horror with mundane New York infrastructure concerns. These are typical Life magazine fare: intellectual humor targeting education, medicine, and religion.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE. Football as a Mental Stimulant. Harvard's football management announced to-day that B—, Exeter's famous old tackle, had succeeded in passing enough entrance examinations to be eligible to play this fall —Daily Paper. HERE we seem to see how ath- letics may serve as a lure to attract ingenuous youth up the steeps of erudition. Football, instead of diverting the Famous Old Tackle from his lessons, has had precisely the contrary effect. He has made, not exactly an intellectual goal, but a touchdown at least, and he has the ball. Malady. Physicians are beginning to recognize worry as a disease, to Wr sSegtabs be prescribed for, like any other malady.—Scientific News, OW reluctant physicians are to add to the list of things which may be prescribed for is to be gathered from the terms of the Hippocratic oath, which all graduates in medicine subscribe. But progress will not be denied. Worry having come at last into its own, the sanguine temperament looks confidently forward to the time when bad manners and false modesty, if not unwisdom and the sense of humor, shall be caused by germs and yield grace- fully to treatment. Eternity Is a Long Time. AY evangelist in a little town was trying to give his hearers an idea of the length of time those must suffer, the end of whose journey is the terminus of the Broad Road. “My brethren,” he exhorted, ‘‘if a little bird were to dip its beak in the Atlantic Ocean, gather up a drop of water and then hop across the continent—not fly, but hop its way inch by inch—until it reached the broad Pacific, and there deposit its little drop of water, walk back and again dip its beak in the Atlantic, and continue this operation until it had emptied the Atlantic into the Pacific ; my brethren, it wouldn’t yet be sun-up in Hell,” Some shuddered in their seats at the awful word-picture, while other of the more zealous brethren cried aloud, “Amen !"" pat: Phwat a wonderful world we live in, anyway. Mike: Yes, but for why ? “Haven't you noticed that in New Yorruk they're putting all the elevated roads underground ?"" comicbooks.com