REVIEW 
187 
Oh then your soul astonished 
Must surely faint and fail, 
Unless, by me admonished, 
You hear our wondrous tale. 
We were a soft Amoeba 
In ages past and gone, 
Ere you were Queen of Sheba, 
And I King Solomon. 
Unorganed, undivided, 
We lived in happy sloth, 
And all that you did I did, 
One dinner nourished both : 
* 
Till you incurred the odium 
Of fission and divorce— 
A severed pseudopodium 
You strayed your lonely course. 
When next we met together 
Our cycles to fulfil, 
Each was a bag of leather, 
With stomach and with gill. 
But our Ascidian morals 
Recalled that old mischance, 
And we avoided quarrels 
By separate maintenance. 
Long ages passed—our wishes 
Were fetterless and free, 
For we were jolly fishes, 
A-swimming in the sea. 
We roamed by groves of coral, 
We watched the youngsters play— 
The memory and the moral 
Had vanished quite away. 
Next, each became a reptile, 
With fangs to sting and slay ; 
No wiser ever crept, I’ll 
Assert, deny who may. 
But now, disdaining trammels 
Of scale and limbless coil. 
Through every grade of mammals 
We passed with upward toil. 
Till, anthropoid and wary 
Appeared the parent ape, 
And soon we grew less hairy 
And soon began to drape. 
So, from that soft Amoeba, 
In ages past and gone, 
You’ve grown the Queen of Sheba, 
And I, King Solomon. 
W. R. H. 
