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“the Purpose Of Air”

March 2024
2min read

The Talk, Long Awaited,


That much of the world’s air is in the wrong place cannot but he plain to an “old sea dog,” who has plied Neptuma’s lar vast empty reaches and found there nought but idle air; surplus ozone; becalmed breeze, and layabout zephyr.

It is useless air, required never to so much as turn a Kansas wind mill, nor dry a line ot Pennsylvania wash, nor cool a hot pan of fresh Missouri corn bread.

“Give It Over, Portugee!”

Reader, foreign climes are empty climes, where air malingers merely. And would the Portugee, the Hindoo, the Hottentot, over whose supine suzerains hovers the mass ot this ether redundant, have a plan for stirring it to useful life?

Only when such “Lesser breeds without the Law” have taught themselves Lnghsh, would we know and “scotch such plans.

While at the same instant, or very near to it, busy America gasps for all the air that is currently elsewhere!

A Horrible Suffocation Is Foreseen In Ohio

The divine preaching his Sunday sermon gasps for breath; and draws none; for the air cannot come over the seas to the church in Ohio, where it is needed, when Kat-Alan-Doo has it.

See the Son umcycling Homeward to Mother at Twilight after Vespers, but he flags at the penultimate furlong; for inhale he cannot the sustaining dollop of oxygenic elixir that is not there, but somewhere in the Alalay Strait.

And away up north of some altitudinal Alaskan nowhere, the air is thin whilst yon outdoorsist clambers peakward up the mountain, and hrst one young lung explodes, and then its twin. While in the mean-time, the air over Bessarabia is a gaseous molasses, thick.

His New Plan Will Make it Right

Will the American outdoorsist be ever denied his fair influx of the Life-Giving Invisible Gas Divine?

How to set the awful injustice aright?

A good plan has been forwarded. It is perfect. It comes from Professor Wimby of the great University at Walla Walla. It is modeled alter the Commerce Secretary’s idea of enforced assets stockpiling in the Bank of the Philippines.

See! The Giant Biscuit Tins!

All the air now idly rusticating in foreign latitudes is to be confiscated by means of mighty hydraulic scoopers, ten times larger than the dredges at Panama, and transferred overseas to the Ports at Philadelphia and San Francisco in giant biscuit tins, each as tall as the State Capital at Des Moines when stood on end, to be then deposited on account in Brobdingnagian coffers , or vaults .

Place these in the Grand Canyon, or on the Choktaw lands.

When new funds of air are needed, say, m Washington D.C. in high summer, or at Lenox, the new Burgess under-ground suction method will thence conduct it by demand draft , via the mighty force of the Hotchkiss Patent Oleo Pump (have you seen it at the St. Louis Exposition?) to the site.

There, helio-fans, each of their paddles exceeding m length the keel of the U.S.S. Kennebunkport , shall spend the air, and quench the need, and so settle accounts , completing the triumph of American engineering genius over the nemesis, Nature.

A Niagara Of Numismatism Is Needed

The moneys for this will be collected by the school children, and sent to me in Washington, pending my appointment as Superintendent of the Magnificent Undertaking by the Committee, soon to convene at Portsmouth for the purpose of forming the United States Air Trust.

The work will go quickly if the children shall but get us the money.

Air being one thousand perrcnt lighter than stone, the work should need one thousandth of the time taken by the Ancients to make the Great Pyramid of Chee-Op, at Egypt.

Commodore Runciman’s Advice

In the mean while, tread only on the verandah or in the garden, for careless perambulation, even in the park, will use up the air.

Did you know that the Rev. Dr. Leech of Tennessee has calculated thai fifty-three percent of all the world s air. in the amount of eighteen trillion billion cubed Babylonian hectares, has already since the time of Seth and Hem been consumed?

If you keep a horse or dog, then train them to take shorter breaths. Cover all boxes, bottles &c., where air likes to hide.

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