Life, 1915-02-04 · page 8 of 44
Life — February 4, 1915 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two distinct satirical items from Life magazine: 1. **"Lots of Mud but No Mystery"** (top left): A geological commentary on the Culebra Cut of the Panama Canal, discussing slides and structural instability. The accompanying sketch shows a well-dressed couple examining a canal project, satirizing public fascination with engineering "mysteries." 2. **"The Dog: Then Me for Hell!"** (top right): A cartoon showing a dog at ornate gates—likely representing heaven or hell—with the caption suggesting ironic commentary on divine judgment. 3. **"Thought in School"** (bottom): Signed "D.B.," this critiques American education, arguing schools fail to teach independent thinking. It includes a sketch captioned "He: Why is it women need many more clothes than men when they wear so much less?" This appears to joke about women's limited clothing choices despite supposedly needing more variety. The satire targets both infrastructure hubris and educational/social gender assumptions.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
180 Lots of Mud but No Mystery HE Sun gives signs of being wor- ried about the slides in the Culebra Cut of the Panama Canal, and wonders “whether any definite purpose .. . is served by continuing to ignore offi- cially and blink optimistically at the geological mystery that lies not on the banks of the great Culebra Cut, but buried behind its slopes”. Good neighbor, be easy. There is no mystery about those slides. The weight of the hills presses the underlying rotten strata up through the bed of the canal, That will go on as long as there is any rotten rock left that is responsive to the available pressure. Colonel Goethals was, at one time, for slicing off the hills and reducing the pressure, but the advisory engineers guessed it would be cheaper to dredge out the squeezed rock as fast as it ap- peared. It is an indefinite job that may go on a good while, but there is no mystery about it, and an end will come to it some time, because there is a considerable underlying area of South America that cannot connect underground with the canal. The Dog: THEN ME FoR HELL! Thought in School HY not teach children to think? They attend costly schools, occupy the time of mature men and women, and after long years come out clutching a Longfellow couplet or a proposition in Euclid and wondering how on earth they can pawn the same for bread. Through childhood into early maturity they have been carried on the shoulders of the State (except in such advanced communities as Georgia, where the State is carried on the children’s shoulders) and they have not yet learned to do the only thing that is in the least valuable He: WHY 18 1T WOMEN NEED MANY to the State or themselves. MORE CLOTHES THAN MEN WHEN Is it barely possible that the teachers themselves have not learned the bold THEY WEAR SO MUCH LESS? art of original mind processes? D. B. comichooky