Word
Via Futility Closet
Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg which egg can become a chicken
in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a twelvemonth,
while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs but give birth to a baby
which will take three-and-twenty years before it can become another
clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and
hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full
grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed? The present
arrangement is not convenient, it is not cheap, it is not free from
danger, it is not only not perfect but is so much the reverse that we
could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we
could look upon it with new eyes, or as the cuckoo perhaps observes it.
— Samuel Butler, “On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of Heredity,” Working Men’s College, London, Dec. 2, 1882
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