The Vagabond

Vag was down in the dumps. He wasn't depressed because of the war this time, although it was a pretty discouraging situation. He wasn't downcast because of the political picture, although he was a little puzzled about Presidential candidates. He wasn't thinking at the moment about unemployment and relief, although he had been pretty worried about it lately. No, the thing that was bothering Vag was that he felt so doggone unimportant.

It all started because Vag had been listening to Professor Kirtley Mather lecture on the historical geology of the world. Perhaps Vag might not have been so disconsolate if Geology covered only the field of geology. But as it was, Geology included astronomy, biology, paleontology, zoology, and a host of other "ologies." And Vag was feeling despondent because every one of these fields seemed to impress him with his own insignificance.

Vag thought he was pretty old. But Geology told him that man had been living on the earth for 200,000 years. That was just a drop in the bucket. The oldest dinosaur egg, in the University Museum, is about 200,000,000 years old. And even this figure cannot compare with the age of the earth, which is probably in the neighborhood of 2,000,000,000 years old.

Vag thought his six-foot frame was quite a respectable size, until Professor Mather told him that the brontosaurus grew to a length of 95 feet. He thought the earth which he inhabited was pretty roomy, until he was told that all of its fellow planets have only one seven-hundredth of the bulk of the solar system, and even the sun, which contains all of the rest of the volume, is just a second or third rate star.

Vag has been coming out of the Geographical Lecture Room lately a sadder and a wiser man.

And he's going to stand about three feet away from his Geology 1 exam today, just so he can get a long range perspective on historical geology.