UNSCIENTIFIC MEMS.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2791, 4 March 1882, Page 2

UNSCIENTIFIC MEMS.

Mr Denton, the popular lecturer, is a capital story-teller, and oacasionally introduces humorous passages into his lectures with capital effect. We give one or two from the second lecture of his course, in which ho dwelt, among other matters, on the origin of petroleum. Mr Denton was once lecturing in an American town remote from the “ oil regions.” Stating in the course of his lecture that oil sometimes spouted out of the ground in prodigious quantities when the source was tapped, an incredulous listener cried out:

“ Stop right there, sir, if you please. Did you say o-o-o-il ?!' “ Yes,” replied the lecturer, “ I said o-o-o-il."-:

“ B’n thar yourself ?” “ Yes.” “ Seed o-oil spoutin’ outer the ground jes’ as you say ?’’ “ Yes, sir, and in immense quantities." “ O-oh I all right. Go a-head sir. I thought, p’raps,—if you hadn’t seen it yourself—it might ’a’ been melasses.” One village philosopher accounted for the presence of oil in the lower deeps by saying- that it was the fat of antediluvian whales, “ drownded in the Flood.” Another “ reckoned ”it came from “ a leak in the earth’s axle-box.” A Kansas farmer offered a more ambitious explanation. The world is a big animal ; the soil an’ rocks is just a hard rough hide, and if you cut into the hide you get water everywhere—that’s blood ; the trees and grass and things of that kind are the hair, and the animals just crawlers among the hair; the crittur breathes, and the tides is the heavin’"of its chest; the skin’s got wrinkles and pimples on to it—them’s mountains ; sometimes dischargin’ boils breaks out —that’s volcanoes ; and when the boils hurt the crittur shrugs hislshoulders, and that’s an airthquake. The ile ? Well, ef your bore through the hide you’re bound to to come to blubber,and then the ile spirts out!