by Mark Twain
You see, that simple matter had been under my eyes from the day I was made, but I had never happened to notice it. It took me some time to accept it and adjust myself to it, and for a long time I could not see a running stream without voluntarily or involuntarily taking note of the dip of the surface, half expecting to see Adam's law violated; but at last I was convinced and remained so; and from that day forth I should have been startled and perplexed to see a waterfall going up the wrong way. Knowledge has to be acquired by hard work; none of it is flung at our heads gratis.
That law was Adam's first great contribution to science; and for more than two centuries it went by his name -- Adam's Law of Fluidic Precipitation. Anybody could get on the soft side of him by dropping a casual compliment or two about it in his hearing.
He was a good deal inflated -- I will not try to conceal it -- but not spoiled. Nothing ever spoiled him, he was so good and dear and right-hearted. He always put it by with a deprecating gesture, and said it was no great thing, some other scientist would have discovered it by and by; but all the same, if a visiting stranger had audience of him and was tactless enough to forget to mention it, it was noticeable that that stranger was not invited to call again. After a couple of centuries, the discovery of the law got into dispute, and was wrangled over by scientific bodies for as much as a century, the credit being finally given to a more recent person. It was a cruel blow. Adam was never the same man afterward. He carried that sorrow in his heart for six hundred years, and I have always believed that it shortened his life. Of course throughout nis days he took precedence of kings and of all the race as First Man, and had the honors due to that great rank, but these distinctions could not compensate him for that lamented ravishment, for he was a true scientist and the First; and he confided to me, more than once, that if he could have kept the glory of Discoverer of the Law of Fluidic Precipitation he would have been content to pass as his own son and Second Man. I did what I could to comfort him. I said that as First Man his fame was secure; and that a time would come when the name of the pretended discoverer of the law that water runs downhill would fade and perish and be forgotten in the earth. And I believe that. I have never ceased to believe it. That day will surely come.
I scored the next great triumph for science myself: to wit, how the milk gets into the cow. Both of us had marveled over that mystery a long time. We had followed the cows around for years -- that is, in the daytime -- but had never caught them drinking a fluid of that color. And so, at last we said they undoubtedly procured it at night. Then we took turns and watched them by night. The result was the same -- the puzzle remained unsolved. These proceedings were of a sort to be expected in beginners, but one perceives, now, that they were unscientific. A time came when experience had taught us better methods. One night as I lay musing, and looking at the stars, a grand idea flashed through my head, and I saw my way! My first impulse was to wake Adam and tell him, but I resisted it and kept my secret. I slept no wink the rest of the night. The moment the first pale streak of dawn appeared I flitted stealthily away; and deep in the woods I chose "a small grassy spot and wattled it in, making a secure pen; then I enclosed a cow in it. I milked her dry, then left her there, a prisoner. There was nothing there to drink -- she must get milk by her secret alchemy, or stay dry.
All day I was in a fidget, and could not talk connectedly I was so preoccupied; but Adam was busy trying to invent a multiplication table, and did not notice. Toward sunset he had got as far as 6 times 9 are 27, and while he was drunk with the joy of his achievement and dead to my presence and all things else, I stole away to my cow. My hand shook so with excitement and with dread failure that for some moments I could not get a grip on a teat; then I succeeded, and the milk came! Two gallons. Two gallons, and nothing to make it out of. I knew at once the explanation: the milk was not taken in by the mouth, it was condensed from the atmosphere through the cow's hair. I ran and told Adam, and his happiness was as great as mine, and his pride in me inexpressible.
Presently he said, "Do you know, you have not made merely one weighty and far-reaching contribution to science, but two." And that was true. By a series of experiments we had long ago arrived at the conclusion that atmospheric air consisted of water in invisible suspension; also, that the components of water were hydrogen and oxygen, in the proportion of two parts of the former to one of the latter, and expressible by the symbol H2O. My discovery revealed the fact that there was still another ingredient -- milk. We enlarged the symbol to H2O,M.
INTERPOLATED EXTRACTS FROM "EVE'S DIARY"
Another discovery. One day I noticed that William McKinley was not looking well.
He is the original first lion, and has been a pet of mine from the beginning. I examined him, to see what was the matter with him, and found that a cabbage which he had not chewed, had stuck in his throat. I was unable to pull it out, so I took the broomstick and rammed it home. This relieved him. In the course of my labors I had made him spread his jaws, so that I could look in, and I noticed that there was something peculiar about his teeth. I now subjected the teeth to careful and scientific examination, and the result was a consuming surprise: the lion is not a vegetarian, he is carnivorous, a flesh-eater!
Intended for one, anyway.
I ran to Adam and told him, but of course he scoffed, saying, "Where would he find flesh?"
I had to grant that I didn't know.
"Very well, then, you see, yourself, that the idea is apocryphal. Flesh was not intended to be eaten, or it would have been provided. No flesh having been provided, it follows, of a necessity, that no carnivora have been intruded into the scheme of things.
Is this a logical deduction, or isn't it?"
"It
is."
"Is there a weak place in it anywhere?"
"No."
"Very well, then, what have you to say?"
"That there is something better than logic."
"Indeed? What is it?"
"Fact."
I called a lion, and made him open his mouth.
"Look at this larboard upper jaw," I said. "Isn't this long forward tooth a canine?"
He was astonished, and said impressively, "By my halidom it is!"
"What are these four, to rearward of it?"
"Premolars, or my reason totters!"
"What are these two at the back?"
"Molars, if I know a molar from a past participle when I see it. I have no more to say, Statistics cannot lie; this beast is not graminivorous."
He is always like that -- never petty, never jealous, always just, always magnanimous; prove a thing to him and he yields at once and with a noble grace. I wonder if I am worthy of this marvelous boy, this beautiful creature, this generous spirit?
It was a week ago. We examined animal after animal, then, and found the estate rich in thitherto unsuspected carnivora. Somehow it is very affecting, now, to see a stately Bengal tiger stuffing himself with strawberries and onions; it seems so out of character, though I never felt so about it before.
[Later]
Today, in a wood, we heard a Voice.
We hunted for it, but could not find it. Adam said he had heard it before, but had never seen it, though he had been quite close to it. So he was sure it was like the air, and could not be seen. I asked him to tell me all he knew about the Voice, but he knew very little. It was Lord of the Garden, he said, and had told him to dress the Garden and keep it; and it had said we must not eat of the fruit of a certain tree and that if we ate of it we should surely die. Our death would be certain. That was all he knew. I wanted to see the tree, so we had a pleasant long walk to where it stood alone in a secluded and lovely spot, and there we sat down and looked long at it with interest, and talked. Adam said it was the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
"Good and evil?"
"Yes."
"What is that?"
"What is what?"
"Why, those things. What is good?"
"I do not know. How should I
know?"
"Well, then, what is evil?"
"I suppose it is the name of something, but I do not know what."
"But, Adam, you must have some idea of what it is."
"Why should I have some idea? I have never seen the thing, how am I to form any conception of it? What is your own notion of it?"
Of course I had none, and it was unreasonable of me to require him to have one.
There was no way for either of us to guess what it might be. It was a new word, like the other; we had not heard them before, and they meant nothing to us. My mind kept running on the matter, and presently I said, "Adam, there are those other new words --
die, and death. What do they mean?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, then, what do you think they mean?"
"My child, cannot you see that it is impossible for me to make even a plausible guess concerning a matter about which I am absolutely ignorant? A person can't think when he has no material to think with. Isn't that true?"
"Yes -- I know it; but how vexatious it is. Just because I can't know, I all the more want to know."
We sat silent a while turning the puzzle over in our minds: then all at once I saw how to find out, and was surprised that we had not thought of it in the beginning, it was so simple. I sprang up and said, "How stupid we are! Let us eat of it; we shall die, and then we shall know what it is, and not have any more bother about it."
Adam saw that it was the right idea, and he rose at once and was reaching for an apple when a most curious creature came floundering by, of a kind which we had never seen before, and of course we dropped a matter which was of no special scientific interest, to rush after one that was.
Miles and miles over hill and dale we chased that lumbering, scrambling, fluttering goblin till we were away down the western side of the valley where the pillared great banyan tree is, and there we caught him. What a joy, what a triumph: he is a pterodactyl! Oh, he is a love, he is so ugly! And has such a temper, and such an odious cry. We called a couple of tigers and rode home, and fetched him along, and now I have him by me, and it is late, but I can't bear to go to bed, he is such a fascinating fiend and such a royal contribution to science. I know I shan't sleep for thinking of him and longing for morning to come, so that I can explore him and scrutinize him, and search out the secret of his birth, and determine how much of him is bird and how much is reptile, and see if he is a survival of the fittest; which we think is doubtful, by the look of him. Oh, Science, where thou art, all other interests fade and vanish away!
Adam wakes up. Asks me not to forget to set down those four new words. It shows that he has forgotten them. But I have not. For his sake I am always watching.
They are down. It is he that is building the Dictionary -- as he thinks -- but I have noticed that it is I who do the work. But it is no matter, I like to do anything that he wants me to do; and in the case of the Dictionary I take special pleasure in the labor, because it saves him a humiliation, poor boy. His spelling is unscientific. He spells cat with a k, and catastrophe with a c, although both are from the same root.
Three days later. We have named him Terry, for short, and oh, he is a love! All these three days we have been wholly absorbed in him. Adam wonders how science ever got along without him till now, and I feel the same. The cat took a chance in him, seeing that he was a stranger, but has regretted it. Terry fetched Thomas a rake fore and aft which left much to be desired in the way of fur, and Thomas retired with the air of a person who had been intending to confer a surprise, and was now of a mind to go and think it over and see how it happened to go the other way. Terry is just grand --
there's no other creature like him. Adam has examined him thoroughly, and feels sure he is a survival of the fittest. I think Thomas thinks otherwise.
Year
3.
Early in July, Adam noticed that a fish in the pond was developing legs --
a fish of the whale family, though not a true whale itself, it being in a state of arrested development. It was a tadpole. We watched it with great interest, for if the legs did really mature and become usable, it was our purpose to develop them in other fishes, so that they could come out and walk around and have more liberty. We had often been troubled about those poor creatures, always wet and uncomfortable, and always restricted to the water whilst the others were free to play amongst the flowers and have a pleasant time. Soon the legs were perfected, sure enough, and then the whale was a frog. It came ashore and hopped about and sang joyously, particularly in the evenings, and its gratitude was without bounds. Others followed rapidly, and soon we had abundant music, nights, which was a great improvement on the stillness which had prevailed before.
We brought various kinds of fishes ashore and turned them loose in the meadows, but in all cases they were a disappointment -- no legs came. It was strange; we could not understand it. Within a week they had all wandered back to the water, and seemed better satisfied there than they had been on land. We took this as evidence that fishes as a rule do not care for the land, and that none of them took any strong interest in it but the whales. There were some large whales in a considerable lake three hundred miles up the valley, and Adam went up there with the idea of developing them and increasing their enjoyment.
When he had been gone a week, little Cain was born. It was a great surprise to me, I was not aware that anything was going to happen. But it was just as Adam is always saying: "It is the unexpected that happens."
I did not know what to make of it at first. I took it for an animal. But it hardly seemed to be that, upon examination, for it had no teeth and hardly any fur, and was a singularly helpless mite. Some of its details were human, but there were not enough of them to justify me in scientifically classifying it under that head. Thus it started as a lusus naturae -- a freak -- and it was necessary to let it go at that, for the time being, and wait for developments.
However, I soon began to take an interest in it, and this interest grew day by day; presently this interest took a warmer cast and became affection, then love, then idolatry, and all my soul went out to the creature and I was consumed with a passion of gratitude and happiness. Life was become a bliss, a rapture, an ecstasy, and I longed, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute for Adam for return and share my almost unendurable joy with me.
Year 4-5. At last he came, but he did not think it was a child. He meant well, and was dear and lovely, but he was scientist first and man afterward -- it was his nature --
and he could accept of nothing until it was scientifically proven. The alarms I passed through, during the next twelvemonth, with that student's experiments, are quite beyond description. He exposed the child to every discomfort and inconvenience he could imagine, in order to determine what kind of bird or reptile or quadruped it was, and what it was for, and so I had to follow him about, day and night, in weariness and despair to appease its poor little sorrows and help it to bear them the best it could. He believed I had found it in the woods, and I was glad and grateful to let him think so, because the idea beguiled him to go away at times and hunt for another, and this gave the child and me blessed seasons of respite and peace. No one can ever know the relief I felt whenever he ceased from his distressful experiments and gathered his traps and bait together and started for the woods. As soon as he was out of sight I hugged my precious to my heart and smothered it with kisses, and cried for thankfulness. The poor little thing seemed to realize that something fortunate for us had happened; and it would kick and crow, and spread its gummy mouth and smile the happy smile of childhood all the way down to its brains -- or whatever those things are that are down in there.
Year 10. Next came our little Abel. I think we were a year and a half or two years old when Cain was born, and about three or three and a half when Abel was added. By this time Adam was getting to understand. Gradually his experiments grew less and less troublesome, and finally, within a year after the birth of Gladys and Edwina -- years 5
and
6 -- ceased altogether. He came to love the children fondly, after he had gotten them scientifically classified, and from that time till now the bliss of Eden is perfect.
We have nine children, now -- half boys and half girls.
Cain and Abel are.beginning to learn. Already Cain can add as well as I can, and multiply and subtract a little. Abel is not as quick as his brother, mentally, but he has persistence, and that seems to answer in the place of quickness. Abel learns about as much in three hours as Cain does, but Cain gets a couple of hours out of it for play. So, Abel is a long time on the road, but, as Adam says, he "arrives on schedule, just the same." Adam has concluded that persistence is one of the talents, and has classified it under that head in his dictionary. Spelling is a gift, too, I am sure of it. With all Cain's brightness he cannot learn to spell. Now that is like his father, who is the brightest of us all, yet whose orthography is just a calamity. I can spell, and so can Abel. These several facts prove nothing, for one cannot deduce a principle from so few examples, but they do at least indicate that the ability to learn to spell correctly is a gift; that it is born in a person, and is a sign of intellectual inferiority. By parity of reasoning, its absence is a sign of great mental power. Sometimes, when Adam has worked a good large word like Ratiocination through his mill and is standing over the wreck mopping away his sweat, I could worship him he seems so intellectually grand and awful and sublime. He can spell Phthysic in more different ways than there are.
Cain and Abel are dear little chaps, and they take very nice care of their little brothers and sisters. The four eldest of the flock go wandering everywhere, according to their desire, and often we see nothing of them for two or three days together. Once they lost Gladys, and came back without her. They could not remember just where or when it was that they missed her. It was far away, they said, but they did not know how far; it was a new region for them. It was rich in berries of the plant which we call the deadly nightshade -- for what reason we do not know. It hasn't any meaning, but it utilizes one of the words which we long ago got of the Voice, and we like to employ new words whenever a chance offers, and so make them workable and handy. They are fond of those berries, and they long wandered about, eating them; by and by when they were ready to go somewhere else, they missed Gladys, and she did not answer to her name.
