Professor Meyers has cleared up Linda Rowe's electronic access issue, so
I've deleted what I wrote about that, but I'll send all the same this not
entirely off-the-wall addendum that I had nearly finished preparing when
that access clarification arrived. (Please note that not once does the
addendum mention Fort Monroe.)
- - - - - - -
I can't resist adding that while looking for the recommended essay "On
Benevolence and Slavery," I tripped over an essay that Professor Dolmetsch's
note says was inspired, in part, by a passage from Joseph Addison’s
Spectator 519, speaking of “the _peopling_ of every Planet" and
conjecturing that "indeed it seems very probable from the Analogy of Reason,
that if no Part of Matter, which we are acquainted with, lies waste and
useless, those great Bodies which are at such a Distance from us should not
be desart and unpeopled, but rather that they should be furnished with
Beings adapted to their respective Situations.” This made my day, a day in
which I'm writing a science-and-the-media column about news coverage of
Mangalyaan, the first Mars probe from India. That spacecraft, now hurtling
toward Mars, is occasioning some pride and happiness in that land.
Starting in September, when it gets to Mars, it is to orbit the planet and
measure methane, a marker of life. In graduate school decades ago, I did an
independent study of the periodical essayists, mainly Dr. Johnson. It
doesn't surprise me that Addison would have fastened onto this prescience,
which he of course did not invent. It was fun to see it come up in this
Tucker material, especially today.
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