Scythe [weariedly].
I don’t know.
Whetstone.
Don’t know! Professor, it cost me a heap of money to build my nursery of learning, the Cornville Academy, and I’m going to make it the biggest paying institution on this broad continent. I’ve advertised you in letters big as fence-posts as our own prided prince of science, engaged at an enormous salary. There are already applications for next term from over five hundred anxious fathers of wonderful sons. Can I afford to disappoint them? No. Can you stand there and calmly tell me you cannot give me so simple a thing as the history of a deep-sea flea?
Scythe [looking at lobster with his glass].
In the race for life, he first made his appearance in the epoch of the mammoth, anterior to the gigantic antediluvians, before the apparition of man upon the earth, and at a season in the progressive series of pre-Adamite evolution soon after the separation of the crocodile branch from the main stem, about forty-five millions of years ago.
Whetstone.
Astonishing! so long as that?
Scythe.
I will not in detail give his scientific biography. It is sufficient that during this period he gorged himself with the blood of these primeval mammoths, which accounts for his size, and often, frenzied by the harrowing appetite of this parasite, these gigantic and prehistoric brutes made the primeval forests for a hundred miles ring with their helpless bellowings. But I will not further excite your pity for the remote ages.