assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for
whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law
of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken
up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the
plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an
increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement which, though
productive of pain to some of our feelings (notably the maternal), is
nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial to the
race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest. Mr S.
Dedalus' (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be called an interruption?)
that an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and
apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect
imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females
emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak
of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find gastric
relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought
else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to.
For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately acquainted with
the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and
embryo philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things
scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides
himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in
the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed victuallers signifies the
cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother. In
a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took
place in the commons' hall of the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30
and 31 Holles street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in
Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported
by eyewitnesses as having stated that once a woman has let the cat
into the bag (an esthete's allusion, presumably, to one of the most
complicated and marvellous of all nature's processes--the act of sexual
congress) she must let it out again or give it life, as he phrased it,
to save her own. At the risk of her own, was the telling rejoinder of
his interlocutor, none the less effective for the moderate and measured
tone in which it was delivered.

Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about