Black Dwarf,  1 (1817), 599–606.

On the Variety of Public Deceptions

Amicus

Genre:

Letter

Subjects:

Animal Behaviour, Political Economy, Vulcanology, Epidemiology, Disease, Medical Treatment, Politics


    Laments the proposed introduction of stock debentures, likening them to 'decoy ducks for the loyal boobies who have not yet deposited their nest eggs in the state rookery' (599). Refers to 'people of the Malthus school, who conceive that if poor men will perversely console themselves with the beggars benison, their brats may safely be hanged, drowned, burned, shot, or starved, pro bono publico' (600). Refers to the Terror as an evil '[w]hich Napoleon terminated by a remedy almost as bad as the disease his nostrum having been adroitly converted into a confirmed lues, now spreading this French pest over the whole of Europe' (601). States that if 'the nearest heir to the expelled Stuarts were now palmed on us, [...] the supposed conflict would commence a scene of horrors, to which all former revolutionary volcanos would be only as the spurting of a gas lamp to the eruptions of mount Atna' (605).



© Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Project, Universities of Leeds and Sheffield, 2005 - 2020

Printed from Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: An Electronic Index, v. 4.0, The Digital Humanities Institute <http://www.sciper.org> [accessed ]