Genre:

Serial, Essay, Drollery

Subjects:

Amusement, Palaeontology, Geology, Skill

    Gives advice on how to perform as a 'light comedian', advice which explains that slapping friends on the shoulder and poking elderly persons in their ribs are 'valuable relics of a former state of manners, which have been happily preserved for us in the matrix of stage-tradition, as the icthyosauri and pterodactyls in the lias and oolite of the geologist'. Suggests that comedians deal with these 'fossilised manners' 'as reverently as Professor Owen would handle a fossil of the Stonesfield slate, or an Elephant's tusk from the Norwich mud'.