The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 3 of 7)

I used to be disgusted and now I try to be amused (I know, early Elvis C. was a personal hero of mine) is sometimes is the only way to get through the day. And to top it off I am Latino, so already they expect total agreement (stereotyping in the extreme) when spewing some white guilt, America-hating tripe from the 60's. The few times I've fired back with the cold slap of reality they acted like I was kidding!

Note: I do keep my conservatism under cover because by personal experience it is better to do so profession-wise.

p>Keep up the good work. br> -- J.E Limon /p> p> HUMBOLDT ROCKS br> Re: Peter Hannaford's Fame Fizzles, But Not Always : /p>

Heavens to Hephaestus, can't you even get 18th century science right?

Peter Hannaford's paean to the good and great Alexander von Humboldt tells us that after perambulating: "Up and down volcanoes, he decided they came from fissures deep the earth, thus upending the popular view that they were built up from ancient oceans."

Hannaford seems to confuse the common wisdom about volcanoes, which antedates Pompeii, with the Neptunist versus Plutonist controversy current in academe when Humboldt was a grad student at the Royal Saxon Bergakademie in the 1790's. The Neptunists maintained that rocks were relics laid down as sediments by the Biblical flood, while godless Plutonists, drunk on secular materialism, raved that granite might once have been molten. The very idea!

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