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more as it jumped with a project of his own for the cure of
the very evil that had been touched on. Whereat he handed
round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he
had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell’s bearing a leg-
end printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser
and Incubator. Lambay Island. His project, as he went on
to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle plea-
sures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay
and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself
to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been
framed. Well, let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr
Dixon. I make no doubt it smacks of wenching. Come, be
seated, both. ‘Tis as cheap sitting as standing. Mr Mulligan
accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon his design,
told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by a
consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory
and the prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were
due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance
as well as whether the prohibition proceeded from defects
congenital or from proclivities acquired. It grieved him
plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its
dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable fe-
males with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who
hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial clois-
ter or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some
unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets
of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex
when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this,
he assured them, made his heart weep. To curb this incon-