Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Steam-power, Gender, Comparative Philology, Miracles,

    Puzzled by a 'nautical notice' for 'Sirens worked by steam', reflecting that this invention would have melted the wax Ulysses used to stop his ears. Notes that Erasmus Darwin was 'much laughed at when, some eighty years ago, he told the Georgian era that steam would do miracles'.