Colonel Cremony, the Baron Münchhausen of the western hemisphere, have preserved for posterity the events which led to the formation of the present shape of this learned and moral organization. To be better understood, when I have to dive into the dark mysteries of post-tertiary times and previous geological periods, I am to repeat here the statements of Tommy and his friend Colonel Cremony, both of them such enthusiastic lovers of truth that they kept all of it to themselves.

You will recollect that the organization of this ancient order had originally the object to protect the genius of the reporter against the want of appreciation by an unenlightened public, as well as the narrowminded and merely mercenary views of the newspaper-owners. Originally of a strictly literary character, the club soon extended its welcome to sculptors and painters, because they strive in the same line-they represent things which are no realities, exactly as our newspapers palm off novelties which

are no facts and facts which are no novelties. Then the welcome was extended for exactly the same reason to lawyers and later to musicians, as the transitory character of their productions cannot inflict any serious harm. Finally some Front-Street millionaires obtained admission by carefully concealing the real amount of their for

tunes.

It is a well-established historical fact that the Spartan hero Leonidas, by George Bromley persistently mistaken for General Barnes, was a prominent member of the organization. Less known it is that the greatest physician of antiquity-Hippocrates-belonged to it. The order always had a great power of attraction for medical men. It was during the last years of the reign of Philip of Macedonia, when the medical profession was suffering from an intensely healthy year; in fact, it was an epidemic of health. The professors of the Polyclinics of Stagira were suffering from starvation. They had grown so thin and

diminished in circumference that they could no more fill their chairs. Hippocrates awoke to the emergency. He saw it was impossible to reproduce the necessary rotundity to fill a medical chair by mere demonstrations a posteriori, so he started a new medical system, chiefly founded on fees, and therefore called the physiological system. He laid great stress on physiology, and wound up every lecture with the admonition, "Be very particular about fees"; and then he grew excited, stamped his feet, and swore an oath, which ever since has been called "the Hippocratic oath," and which each of the medical fraternity, even our most gracious Sire, has been compelled to swear. This oath gives us power over the life and death of our fellow-citizens.

It was towards the end of the Lias formation when the citizens of San Francisco handed in a petition to the Legislature, meeting just then at Sacramento, for a volcano. They argued that if an effete monarchy like Italy can raise two volcanoes,

this free community of loyal, hard-drinking taxpayers is at least entitled to one. Blackstone, who was then a member of the Legislature, said the point was well taken. A committee was appointed, an appropriation raised, and Telegraph Hill selected as a center for the newly created forces. Unfortunately, the head engineer, who very appropriately had been selected from amongst the most practical sailors of the Life-Saving Station, had economized with the material so that locally he only produced an eruption of the skin; but the miscalculated forces caused the Second-Street cut and a long series of earthquakes, which interfered greatly with the stability of the California coast line. It is not quite certain whether it was Divine Providence or our Board of Supervisors that restored the stability of our coast line by placing the powerful Captain Kenzel on it, whose soothing influence quieted the disturbed nervous system of Mother Earth and kept it in its position ever since. However, the

powerful Captain would not have succeeded if he had not found assistance in a Board of Health whose weight and physical proportions had grown to an extent that they spoiled a North-Pole expedition, none of the scientific staff of the expedition being able to pass through the Behring Straits.

The disturbance of the post-tertiary era finally was kept down by our Geological Survey; a few ice-cream saloons on Kearny Street being the only remainder of the glacial period; but revolutionary tendencies crept into society because society had witnessed so many violent geological disturbances and was infected by the bad example set by Nature herself. This circumstance was the cause that the powers of our public officers had to be extended, and was the first step to the development of the present despotic government of the Bohemian Club, which, although benevolent, is very powerful.

Our present Sire, for the sake of his physical and moral beauty, occupied this post