Varieties.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 54, 3 February 1872, Page 16

Varieties.

A welcome ship at any time —Friendship. Cheap Generosity—Giving a piece of your mind. What is the key-note to good-breeding ? Bnatural. Mummies do not look as though they were in a hurry, yet it is certain that at first they must have been pressed for time. Ah Irishman, trying to put out a gaslight with his fingers, cried out, ’ Och, murder! the devil a wick’s in it!’ An avaricious man, after having kindled his fire, stuck a cork in the end of the bellows to save a little wind that was left in them. A person abusing another to Charles Russell, said he was so insufferably dull, that if you said a good thing he did not understand it. ‘ Pray sir,’ said Charles, ‘ did you ever try him ?’ Quite TnE Wrong- Peace. (Scene : Crowded church at fashionable watering place) —Lady (emerging from seat) —‘ Oh, this won’t do at all! We can see nothing here!’ The Peer and the Proletarian, —Proletarian (embracing) : ‘My long lost brother:’ —Peer : ‘ Delighted I’m shaw to do anything to ameliawate your condition, but weally this is a little too stwong !’ The New Color. —‘Warranted Fast.’— Constantia : * Georgy, dear (never so dear as when shopping), I do like that shade ; it just suits me 1’ Poor George (who means what he says) : ‘ I wish to goodness it didn’t!’ A young man living in Wales is humility personified. The other day he asked a young lady if he might be allowed the privilege of going home with her, and he was indignantly refused, whereupon he inquired, very humbly, if he might be allowed to sit on the fence and see her go by.’ Didn’t Quite Catch It. —Old Mangelwurzel: —Hornin’, sir! You be rather late in the season, bain’t ’ee ?—Jack Sketchman : Yaas : Just catch the Autumn tints, you know. —Old M.: Catch the ?’ Oh, ah ! I ’spect you wull, too, they be a great deal about, and there’s been a mortal lot carried off by the complaint. Fool-some Flattery. —lst boy : ' I say what’s the time, boy—is it twelve yet ?’ 2nd 1 Boy : * ’T carn’t be more.’ Ist Boy: * What

d’you mean ; is it one yet ?’ 2nd ditto : *'T carn’t be less.’ Ist Ditto : ‘ H’m, they want a fool down at the George you’d better go for the situation.’ 2d ditto: ‘ Oh! beest thou gwine to leave then ?’ A young lawyer boasting of his readiness to undertake the defence of any person accused of crime, declared he would as soon undertake the cause of a man whom he knew to be guilty as one whom he believed to be innocent. An aged Quaker being present be appealed to him for the correctness of his views— * What say you of that old gentleman ’ ‘ Why, I say that if thee lived in my neighborhood I should keep my.stable locked, that’s all,’ replied the Quaker.

‘The Finishing Touch!’ —Farmer (who had been most obliging, and taken great interest in the picture) : ‘ Good morn’n, sir! But —(aghast)—I say, what are you doin of, mister P A p’intin’ all them beastly poppies in my corn :— ‘ A bit o’ color ?’—What ’ould my landlord say, d’ you think ?—and after I’d put off cuttin’ cause you hadn’t finished to oblige yer, I didn’t think you’d a done it! You don’t come a p’inting on my land any more!’ (Exit in great dudgeon.) Almost a Sufficient Reason. —Angelina : Sarah! Have any of those mischievous children been playing with the piano while I have been out of town—some of the keys won’t sound at all?—Sarah: Please, mum, I don’t know nothink about it—leastways, Master Tom said there was somethink wrong with it, which he was sure there was.- a mouse in it, so he got Joe to hold up the cover while he put the dorg and cat in ; but instead of catching the mouse, mum, they took to fightin’ and did make such a funny noise in among them wires—so, maybe, mum, the mouse is in there still mum.

The Rev Cannon Kingsley on theObtgin OF Man. —The Rev Cannon Kingsley presided at the inaugural meeting of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science. In the course of his address the President said: —Meanwhile, as scientific men, we shall be wish, I think, in withholding our assent to certain modern hypotheses as to the human race. I do not say that they are altogether untrue : but I do say that I cannot yet regard them as proven. It seems to me that the very antiquity of the human race, which these gentlemen assert, makes their theory about savages questionable. I fully accept the immeuse antiquity of the human race. I even accept as possible the guess of a certain very distinguished scientific friend of mine, and that before all is done we may stumble yet on the remains of a Silurian man. But I say, the older man is proved to be, the more likely he is to have changed meanwhile. As for the Esquimaux-like savags whose implements of flint orbonearefoundincavesand river gravels, they may have been the earliest human race which appeared or re-appeared, in Europe, when it recovered from the great catastrophe of the Glacial epoch. That, it seems to me, is all that we can say to them. As for their being the original type of man, as for our being able to argue from their habits what were the habits of our remotest ancestors, that I must deny, as utterly as I deny it of any and every savage now existing. In the first place, man, hairless, feeble, and possessed of no natural weapons, must have begun his career in the tropics, probably in some part of the tropics where there war no large or dangerous beasts of prey and no violent inclemencies of weather. In a word, be must, he must have commenced his career, as Mr Darwin allows, in some earthly paradise. But once being there, with food and comfort ready to his hand, he would stay there as long as he could. The hunters of reindeer, and bison, and rhinoceros, and mammoth, on the then barren moors of France, Belgium, and England, must have come thither against their natural inclination. Not of their own choice did they face the lion, the bear, and the hyaena, but because they were driven north, as their probable descendants, the Laplanders and Esquimaux, the Samoiedes Tungoos, have been driven northward since into the Arctic ice. If so they were probably of a lower type. For it is a general rule that in the extreme north and south of continents, or amid the most inclement mountain ranges, the lower and older races of a country are to be found. Stronger and more courageous invaders take possession of the rich and warm lowlands, and drive them to the mountains, or the Arctic shores. I should say therefore, that the mere fact of these poor people having pushed northward is firm reason for supposing that there were even then, down south of them, strong and, it may be civilised races, from the face of whom they were fleeing, to take refuge among the northern snows. And it is on the ground of this very possibility that I am led more and more to doubt whether we can ever know anything certainly about a primeval man at all. For see ; tlie more ancient you confess the human race to be, the more time you allow for whole peoples to have risen, become great, strong, civilised ; and tlie more time too for whole peoples to have fallen again, and become weak, base, barbarous. For civilisation may fall as well as rise. Those who talk of a continual progress upward in man forgot how many facts are against them. Has Greece risen or fallen in the last two thousand years ? Has the whole East risen or fallen in the last two thousand years ? Ha 9 Spain risen or fallen in the last two hundred years ? In America alone have not two great civilisations, that of Mexico and that of Peru, sunk into savagery again during the last three hundred years ? And how many times may not the &ame thing have happened on the earth ? If lam to believe (as I think we must now believe) that the human race iB of immense antiquity, then I shall see more likelihood, more reasonableness, in those magnificent Arablegends of whole dynastiesof pre-Adamite sultans, apd all the gorgeous fables of vanished greatness and glory of which the East is full, than the theory that man crawled on as a savage, or semi-eavage, for countless ages.