The World’s Wit and Humor: An Encyclopedia in 15 Volumes. 1906.
Bret Harte (18361902)To the Pliocene Skull
From “Complete Poetical Works”
“S
Primal pioneer of pliocene formation,
Hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum
Of volcanic tufa!
Older than the trees, the oldest Cryptogamy;
Older than the hills, those infantile eruptions
Of earth’s epidermis!
That those vacant sockets filled with awe and wonder—
Whether shores Devonian or Silurian beaches—
Tell us thy strange story!
By some thousand years thy advent on this planet,
Giving thee an air that’s somewhat better fitted
For cold-blooded creatures?
When above thy head the stately Sigillaria
Reared its columned trunks in that remote and distant
Carboniferous epoch?
Songless, silent, hushed, with never bird or insect,
Veiled with spreading fronds and screened with tall club-mosses,
Lycopodiaceæ—
And around thee crept the festive Ichthyosaurus,
While from time to time above thee flew and circled
Cheerful Pterodactyls.
Crinoids on the shell and Brachiopods au naturel—
Cuttlefish to which the pieuvre of Victor Hugo
Seems a periwinkle.
Solitary fragment of remains organic!
Tell the wondrous secret of thy past existence—
Speak! thou oldest primate!”
And a lateral movement of the condyloid process,
With post-pliocene sounds of healthy mastication,
Ground the teeth together.
Stained with expressed juices of the weed Nicotian,
Came these hollow accents, blent with softer murmurs
Of expectoration:
Falling down a shaft in Calaveras County,
But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces
Home to old Missouri!”