JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

Tonight I found a wonderful little biology pamphlet sandwich between two other very thin pamphlets—Free Our Political Prisoners, by the League for the Amnesty of Political Prisoners, ca. 1920, and A Grammar of the Marathi Language, 1868—the three of them together not weighing four ounces. The bio pamphlet is a very non-droll and forced-funny publication out out by the Beta Beta Betans of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, at the end of the War in 1945, and is called Songs of Biology. None of them are any good, though they’re not quite bad enough to land in the safety zone of so-terribly-bad-that-it-is-good. The only simultaneity that occurs here is the level of badness living down to its expectation.

I do have to commend them on at least some of the song subject and titles, several of which were very unexpected. For example, I doubt that many other songs have been written about turpentine. A few of the others that are more enjoyable to imagine the lyrics than to read them are “The Sad Fate of a Youthful Sponge”, “Objective Tests”, “Parasites on Parade”, “The Germ-Laden Bucket”, “The Simple Arthopod”, and :”ode to Drosophila”. They’d be better with no music and no lyrics.

Anyway, I present the glory of turpentine…