Will Cuppy - How to tell your friends from the apes (1931)

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The Dotterel weighs only four ounces. It has long been a scientific riddle how so much wrong-headedness can manage to exist in so small a space. Still, there's the Least Gnatcatcher.

Will Cuppy
Pliny the Elder described a Whale called "Balaena or Whirlpool, which is so long and broad as to take up more in length and breadth than two acres of ground." This brings up again the old question: Are the classics doomed? Our ancestors believed that four years of this sort of information would inevitably produce a President, or at least a Cabinet Member. It didn't seem to work out that way.

Will Cuppy
The Modern Man or Nervous Wreck is the highest of all mammals because anyone can see that he is. There are about 2,000,000,000 Modern Men, or too many. The Modern Man's highly developed brain has made him what he is and you know what he is. It is because of his brain that he has risen above the animals. Guess which animals he has risen above.

Will Cuppy
Aristotle described the Crow as chaste. In some departments of knowledge, Aristotle was too innocent for his own good.

Will Cuppy
Each male has from 2 to 790 females with whom he discusses current events. Of these he marries from 3 to 17.

Will Cuppy
The Zebra is striped all over so that the Lion can see him and eat him. Some people say he is striped so that the Lion can not see him. These people believe that the stripes of the Zebra simulate the bars of sunlight falling through the tall jungle grasses and that therefore the Zebra is invisible and that the earth is flat.

Will Cuppy
To give the Beaver his due, he does things because he has to do them, not because he believes that hard work per se will somehow make him a better Beaver — the Beaver may be dumb, but he is not that dumb! The Beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell.

Will Cuppy
Male penguins are unfaithful up to an advanced age, a phenomenon sometimes attributed to the sea air.

Will Cuppy
Much still remains to be learned about his sex life because the Hummingbird is quicker than the eye.

Will Cuppy
The male is colored much more gorgeously than the female so that he can be shot and made into feather embroidery.

Will Cuppy
Aristotle maintains that the neck of the Lion is composed of a single bone. Aristotle knew nothing at all about Lions, a circumstance which did not prevent him from writing a good deal on the subject.

Will Cuppy
All Modern Men are descended from a Wormlike creature but it shows more on some people.

Will Cuppy
Other foolish birds include the Semipalmated Plover, the Marbled Godwit, the Carolina Mosshead, the Tasmanian Googlenose and the Fool Hen or Franklin Grouse of the Rockies.

Will Cuppy