The sad suicide of Dr. Eno M. Kerk in 1930 was laid to the fact that he had just got a vitamin isolated from the E class and almost into the F, when the room suddenly got warm and it turned into a full-fledged vitamin G. The doctor was heartbroken and deliberately died of malnutrition by refusing to eat any of the other vitamins from that day on. If he couldn’t have vitamin F, he wouldn’t have any. The result was a fatal combination of rickets, beriberi, scurvy. East Indian flagroot, and all other diseases which come from an undersupply of vitamins (most of them diseases which nice people up North wouldn’t have).
First in our search for a vitamin which would answer to the name of F, we had to figure out something that it would be good for. You can’t just have a vitamin lying around doing nothing. We therefore decided that vitamin F would stimulate the salivary glands and the tear ducts. If, for instance, you happen to be a stamp licker or envelope sealer, or like to cry a lot, it will be necessary for you to eat a great deal of food which is rich in vitamin F. Otherwise your envelopes won’t stay stuck, or, when you want to cry, all you can do is make a funny-looking face without getting anywhere.
For research work we decided that the natives of one of the Guianas (British-French, or French-British, or Harvard-Yale) would present a good field, so we took a little trip down there to see just what food values they were short of. Most of the food in the Guianas consists of Guiana hen in its multiple variants, with a little wild Irish rice on the side to take away the taste. The natives reverse the usual order of tribal eating, placing the hen and rice outside a large bowl and getting into the bowl themselves, from which vantage point they are able to pick up not only the food but any little bits of grass and pebbles which may be lying on the ground beside it. This method of eating is known as hariboru, or “damned inconvenient.”
Naturally, a diet consisting entirely of Guiana hen and wild Irish rice is terribly, terribly short on vitamin F, with the result that natives are scarcely able to lick their lips, much less a long envelope. And when they want to cry (as they do whenever anyone speaks crossly to them) they make a low. grinding noise with their teeth and hide their eyes with one hand to cover up their lack of tears. We played them “Silver Threads Among the Gold” one night on our ukuleles, with Dr. Meexus singing the tenor, and although every eye in the house was dry, the grinding sound was as loud as the creaking timbers on an excursion boat. (As loud, but nothing like.)
The next thing to do was to discover what foods contain vitamin F. Here was a stickler! We had discovered it in a mess of mackerel bones, so evidently mackerel bones contain it. But you can’t tell people to eat lots of mackerel bones.
Now, from a study of vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and G, we knew that all one really needs to have, in order to stock up on any of these strength-giving elements, is milk. Milk and cod-liver oil. Milk has vitamin A, vitamins B, E, and G – so it is pretty certain to have vitamin F. For all we knew, it might also contain vitamin F sharp. So we picked milk as the base of our prescribed diet and set about to think up something else to go with it.
Then it occurred to Dr. Meexus that he had a lot of extra radishes growing in his garden, radishes which he was sure he had not planted. He had planted lots of other vegetables, beans, peas, Swiss chard, and corn, but radishes were the only things that had come up in any quantity. He was radish poor. And he figured out that practically six million amateur gardeners were in the same fix. Where you find one amateur gardener in a fix, you are pretty likely to find six million others in the same one. And, according to the Department of Agriculture’s figures for 1931 (April-September), practically every amateur gardener in the country was in some sort of fix or other, mostly due to a bumper crop of radishes.
We therefore decided that radishes must contain a lot of vitamin F, since they contain nothing else, unless possibly a corky substance which would be used only in the manufacture of life preservers. “Milk and radishes” was selected as the slogan for vitamin F.
We figured it out that our chief advantage over the other vitamin teams was in the choice of conditions which our vitamin would cure. The vitamin B group had taken over beri-beri, but who wants to have beriberi for a disease to be avoided? Vitamin D is a cure for rickets, but most of our patients ought to know by now whether they are going to have rickets or not. (We planned to cater to the more mature, sophisticated Long Island crowd, and, if they haven’t had rickets up until now, they don’t much care. If they have had them, it is too late anyway, and you can always say that your legs got that way from riding horseback.)
Vitamin C is corking for scurvy, but, here again, scurvy is not in our line.
In fact, I don’t know much about scurvy, except that it was always found breaking out on shipboard when sailing vessels went around the Horn. But Dr. Hess, one of the discoverers of vitamin C, has pointed out that scurvy need not always be present in cases demanding vitamin C.
According to Hess (you must always call doctors who discover something by their last names without the “Dr.”), the frequency among children in which irritability can be cured by vitamin C is proof that it has more uses than one.
This was pretty smart of Hess to pick on such a common ailment as irritability among children, for, up until the discovery of vitamin C, the only cure for this had been a good swift smack on the face.
However, it looks now as if we were stuck with a perfectly good vitamin and nothing for it to cure. Licking stamps and crying aren’t quite important enough functions to put a vitamin on its feet. We have announced its discovery, and have given to the world sufficient data to show that it is an item of diet which undoubtedly serves a purpose. But what purpose? We are working on that now, and ought to have something very interesting to report in a short time. If we aren’t able to, we shall have to call vitamin F in, and begin all over again.
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Inherent Vice:
Express Paid
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Some evening, when you haven’t anything to read, why not light a cozy fire, draw up your chair, and browse around among your old express receipts and bills of lading? You will learn a lot. Here you have been going on for years, sending parcels and crates like mad, and I’ll bet that not one of you really knows the contractual obligations you have been entering into with the companies who serve you. For all you know, you have been agreeing to marry the company manager at the end of sixty days.
As I write this, I am sitting in the gloaming of a late autumn afternoon with an express company’s receipt on the table before me. As I read over the fine print on the back of it, my eyes cross gradually with the strain and I put on the light. (What a wonderful invention – electricity! I am sure that we should all be very proud and happy to be living in this age.)
As my eyes adjust themselves, I find that when I sent that old bureau to Ruth’s folks, I agreed to let the express company get away with the following exceptions to their liability. (If you are going to read this article, I would advise studying the following. It will probably amuse you more than what I have to say afterward.)
The company shall in no event be liable for any loss, damage, or delay to said property or to any part thereof occasioned by act of God, by perils or accidents of the sea or other waters, [That “other waters” makes a pretty broad exemption, when you come to think of it. It means that they can upset tumblers on your stuff, or let roguish employees play squirt guns all over it, and yet not be responsible.] or of navigation or transportation of whatsoever nature or kind; by fire or explosion . . . by theft or pilferage [What about garroting?] by any person whatsoever; by arrest or restraint of governments, princes, rulers, or peoples or those purporting to exercise governmental or other authority; by legal process or stoppage in transit; by fumigation or other acts or requirements of quarantine or sanitary authorities; [Tell me when you are getting tired.] by epidemics, pestilence, riots; or rebellions, by war or any of the dangers incident to a state of war, or by acts of any person or group of persons purpo
rting to wage war or to act as a belligerent; [Come, come, Mr. Express Company – aren’t you being just a little bit picayune?] by strikes or stoppage of labor or labor troubles, whether of carrier’s employees or others; by unseaworthiness of any vessel, lighter, or other craft whatsoever, [Not even just a teeny-weeny bit of a rowboat?] although existing at the time of shipment on board thereof; . . . by water, [You said that once before.] heating, or the effects of climate, frost, decay, smell, taint, rust, sweat, dampness, mildew, spotting, rain or spray. [Ninety-five-a-hundred-all around my goal are it.] INHERENT VICE, [Remember that one; we’re coming back to that later.] drainage, leakage, vermin, improper or insufficient packing, inaccuracies or obliterations, errors, [Why don’t they just say “errors” and let it go at that?] nor for the breakage of any fragile articles or damage to any materials consisting of or contained in glass; nor shall this company [Beginning all over again, in case you should have forgotten who it is that isn’t responsible.] be held liable or responsible for any damage to or resulting from dangerous corrosives, explosives, or inflammable goods, even if the true nature has been declared to the company; nor for neglect, damage, accident to or escape or mortality of any animals or birds [Ah-ha! They forgot fish!] received by the company hereunder, from any cause whatsoever.
That’s all! Aside from that, the express company is responsible for your package.
Aside from that, your little crate or barrel is as safe as it would be in your own home. It would almost be better to get a sled and drag your package yourself to wherever you want it taken.
At least you could personally fight off vermin and princes (or those purporting to be vermin and princes).
But the thing that worries me most about this contract between me and the express company is that clause about “inherent vice.”
The company is not responsible for any damage to that bureau of mine if it is caused by inherent vice. This makes you stop and think.
Wholly aside from the Calvinistic dourness of the phrase “inherent vice” (I thought that the theory of Original Sin and Inherent Vice went out with the hanging of witches), the question now arises – whose inherent vice? The company’s officials? The bureau’s? Aunt Alice’s? We are up against quite a nice problem in ethics here.
I can’t imagine what you could send by express that would be full enough in inherent vice to damage it en route. Certainly nothing that you could pack in a bureau.
You might send some very naughty rabbits or squirrels by express, but it seems a little narrow-minded to put all the responsibility for their actions on the little creatures themselves. No one has ever told them that they are vicious, or that they were conceived in sin. They don’t know that they are being bad.
I have known one or two very smart dogs who were pretty self-conscious about being wicked and couldn’t look you in the eye afterward, but aside from cases like that it seems a bit arbitrary for a big public-service corporation like an express company to frown on the peccadillos of five or six squirrels.
Would the private lives of the company officials themselves bear looking into so well that they must prate of inherent vice? Live and let live, say I.
Which brings us to the other theory – that inherent vice in the company’s officials or employees cannot be held responsible for any damage to my bureau.
Do you mean to tell me that if one of the company’s employees is a man who, ever since he was a boy, has been willfully and maliciously destructive, and that if he takes my bureau out of its crate and chops the whole thing up into kindling – do you mean to tell me that I am without recourse to the law?
If the president of the express company or any one of his employees goes monkeying around with my bureau and then pleads “not guilty” because of his inherent vice, I will start a putsch that will bring our government crashing down around our ears.
I refuse to discuss the remaining possibility – that the inherent vice referred to means inherent vice in Aunt Alice, or consignee.
This brings us to the conclusion that what is meant by that package or bale or crate (or articles purporting to be packages, or bales, or crates) might have inherent vice enough to spoil it, and that, in this event, the company washes its hands of the whole affair.
The only alternative to this almost incredibly silly reservation is that there has been a misprint and that what the company is so afraid of is “inherent mice.” In this case, I have taken up all your time for nothing. But I do think that you ought to know what you are agreeing to when you send an express package. Or perhaps you don’t care.
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Sand Trouble
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It doesn’t seem much more than a month since I shook the remaining grains of last season’s sand out of my shoes. Here’s another summer nearly gone, and I find I am doing it again.
By “it” I mean the process of getting sand on and into things and then getting it off and out of things, at which most of us spend our summers. If, during the winter months when we are in the city, we had to cope with an element as cussed as sand, we would be writing letters to the papers and getting up committees to go to the City Hall about it. If, every night when we got home from work, we had to shake out our shoes and empty out our pockets to get rid of a fine scratchy substance which was infesting the city, there would be such a muttering all over town that you would think there was a thunderstorm coming up. And yet, when it is a part of our vacation, we take it, along with all other inconveniences, and pay money for it. It sometimes seems as if we weren’t very bright.
Of course, there is sand and sand. I am a great admirer of nice, hard, smooth sand which knows its place, especially if I can draw pictures in it with a stick. I guess there is no more exquisite pleasure. It is a little more enjoyable if you happen to be able to draw well, but even just little five-pointed stars and egg-and-dart designs are a great comfort. Sand is also a good place on which to write, “I love you,” as it would be difficult to get it into court after several years have passed.
But a great majority of the grains of sand on the earth’s surface do not know their place. They are always wanting to go somewhere – with you. Just how several hundred grains of sand work it to get up from the beach and into the short hair on the back of your neck is one of Old Mother Nature’s mysteries, but they do it, and with a great deal of dispatch, too. I can go on to a beach and stand perfectly upright, touching nothing but the soles of my feet to the ground, for four minutes, with my hands held high above my head, and at the end of that time there will be sand in my pockets, on the back of my neck, around my belt line (inside), and in my pipe. It is marvelous.
Smoking is one of life’s pleasures which is easiest marred by this little trick of sand. After a swim in the ocean or lake there is nothing more refreshing than the tang of tobacco smoke, yet the risks incident to lighting a pipe or a cigarette are so great that it is hardly worth while. A pipe is particularly susceptible. You can wait until you have had your swim and then have a man come down from the bathhouse with a fresh pipe in a chamois bag, which he himself can insert in your mouth (naturally, not still in the chamois bag) and which he can light for you with matches also brought freshly to the beach, handled only with silk gloves. And yet, at the first drag, there will come that sickening crackling sound like an egg frying in deep fat, indicating that the stem is already as full of sand particles as a shad is of roe, and presently your teeth are a-grit (and on your teeth three grains of sand will do the work of thousands) and in no time sand is in your eye.
Just to avoid this blight on beach smoking I had a leather-smith make me a little box, with compartments just fitting my pipe, a box of cigarettes, a box of matches, and my watch. (Sand in watches would make a whole treatise in itself.) Although I came under suspicion of carrying a vanity case when I appeared on the beach with this outfit, it nevertheless seemed worth it to keep my smoking utensils free from the usual pulverized rock. But the very first day, when I came out of the wa
ter and, unwrapping my box from two towels, unlocked it with a combination known only to myself and my banker, I found that my pipe, cigarettes, and matches were merely parts of a sand design such as men build along by the boardwalk at Atlantic City. In fact, there was more sand on them than usual, because the box had served as a catchall in which sand could concentrate and pile up without being blown away by the breeze. Since then 1 have given up smoking on the beach.
Lying supine (or even prone, for that matter) on the sand is one of those activities which always seem more fun just before you do them. You think how wonderful it would be to stretch out under the sun and bake, letting the world, as the Duncan Sisters used to do in soprano and alto, go drifting by. So you take up your favorite position (which very shortly turns out to be not your favorite position, much to your surprise) and, shutting your eyes, abandon yourself to a pagan submission to the sun and its health-giving beams.
Gradually small protuberances arise from the beach underneath you, protuberances which were not there when you lay down but which seem to have forced their way up through the sand for the express purpose of irritating you. If you are lying on your face, the sand just at the corner of your mouth raises itself up in a little mound just high enough to enter between the upper and lower lip. If you are lying on your back, the same sand raises itself into an even higher mound and one with a curve at the top so that it still gets into the corner of your mouth. All this happens without outside aid.
But there is plenty of outside aid available. One small boy playing tag fifty feet away, and running past anywhere within radius, can throw off enough sand to blind an ordinary man. And, as there must be at least two small boys to make a game of tag anything but a mockery, enough sand is thrown off to blind two ordinary men. A dog, merely by trotting by, can get almost the same effect. And it is very seldom that a dog is content with merely trotting by. I have never yet stretched myself on a beach for an afternoon’s nap that a dog, fresh from a swim, did not take up a position just to the left of my tightly closed eyes, and shake himself. I need hardly go into this.
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