THE BAD BOY’S IDEA OF ADAM’S FALL.
Precisely how, why, when, where and by whom petroleum was first discovered and utilized nobody living can, and nobody dead will, tell anxious inquirers. The information has “gone where the woodbine twineth,” to join the dodo, the megatherium, the ichthyosaurus and the “lost arts” Wendell Phillips embalmed in fadeless prose. An erratic Joe-Millerite has traced the stuff to the Garden of Eden in a fashion akin to the chopping logic of the Deacon’s “Wonderful One-Horse Shay.” Hear him:
“Adam had a fall?”
“Sure as death and taxes.”
“Why did he fall with such neatness and dispatch?”
“Maybe he took a spring to fall.”
“Naw! Because everything was greased for the occasion! Unquestionably the only lubricant on this footstool just then was the petroleum brewed in God’s own subterranean stills. Therefore, petroleum figured in Eden, which was to be demonstrated according to Hoyle. See?”
There is no “irrepressible conflict” between this reasoning, the version of the Pentateuch and the idea of Peck’s Bad Boy that “Adam clumb a appul-tree to put coal-oil onto it to kill the insecks, an’ he sawed a snaik, an’ the oil made the tree slippy, an’ he fell bumpety-bump!” What a heap of trouble would have been avoided if that pippin had been soaked in crude-oil, that Eve might turn up her nose at it and give the serpent the marble heart! As Miss Haney expresses it:
“O Eve, little Eve, if you only had guess’d
Who it was that tempted you so,