has led me to
cultivate an unconcerned aloofness from a pursuit which is ruinous to
the old and corrupting to the young.
Were the present state of literature more hopeful, perhaps I should find
pleasure in reading, but I have viewed with such increasing alarm the
growth of sensationalism in the literary output of my age that I have
felt that I owed it to my posterity, which is rapidly growing in
numbers--I believe that the latest annual report of the Society of the
Sons and Daughters of Methuselah shows a membership of six hundred
and thirty-eight thousand, without counting the new arrivals since the
end of the last fiscal year, which, at a rough guess, I should place at
thirty-six thousand--I have felt, I say, that I owe it to that posterity to
set it the example of not reading, as my most effective protest against
those pernicious influences which have made the modern literary
school a menace to civilization. Surely if Noah's children for instance,
Shem, Ham and Japhet, whom I have already had occasion to mention,
were to surprise me, their venerable, and I hope venerated ancestor,
reading such stories as are now put forth by our most successful
quarrymen--stories like that unspeakable novel "Three Decades," of
which I am credibly informed eight million tons have already been sold;
and which, let me say, when I had read only seven slabs of it I had
carted away and dumped into the Red Sea; or the innocuous but highly
frivolous tales of Miss Laura Jean Diplodocus--they would hardly
accept from me as worthy of serious attention such admonitions as I am
constantly giving them on the subject of the decadence of literature
when I find them poring over the novels of the day. Consequently even
this usual solace of old age is denied to me, and writing becomes my
refuge.
I bespeak the reader's indulgence if he or she find in the ensuing pages
any serious lapses from true literary style. I write merely as I feel, and
do not pretend to be either an expert hieroglyphist or a rhetorician of
commanding quality. Perhaps I should do more wisely if I were to
accept the advice of my great-grandson Ham, who, overhearing my
remark to a caller last Sunday evening that the work I have undertaken
is one of considerable difficulty, climbed up into my lap and in his
childish way asked me why I did not hire a boswell to do it for me. I
had to tell the child that I did not know what a boswell was, and when I
questioned him on the subject more closely, I found that it was only
one of his childish fancies. If there were such a thing as that rather
euphoniously named invention of Ham's who could relieve me of the
drudgery of writing my own life, and who would do it well, I would
cheerfully relinquish that end of my enterprise to him, but in the
absence of such a thing, I am, in spite of my manifest shortcomings,
compelled to do the work myself. On behalf of my story I can say,
however, that whatever I shall put down here will be the truth, and that
what I remember notwithstanding my advanced years, I remember
perfectly. I am quite aware that in some of the tales that I shall tell,
especially those having to do with Prehistoric Animals I have met, or
Antediluvians as I believe the Scientists call them, what I may say as to
their habits--I was going to say manners, but refrain because in all my
life I have never observed that they had any--and powers may fall upon
some ears as extravagant exaggerations. To these let me say here and
now that there are exceptions to all rules, and that if for instance, I tell
the story of a Pterodactyl that after being swallowed whole by a
Discosaurus, successfully gnaws his way through the walls of the
latter's stomach to freedom, I make no claim that all Pterodactyls could
do the same, but merely that in this particular case the Pterodactyl to
which I refer did it, and that I know that he did it because the man who
saw it is a cousin of my grandfather's first wife's step-son, and is so
wedded to truth that he is even now in jail because he would not deny a
charge of sheep-stealing, which he might easily have done were he an
untruthful man. Again when I observe that I have caught with an
ordinary fish-hook, baited with a common garden, or angle worm, on
the end of a light trout-line, a Creosaurus with a neck ninety-seven feet
long, and scales so large that you could weigh a hay-wagon on the
smallest of the lot
![](qr/22293/3.png)
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the
Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.