cnv00031Dear Miss Notbut and Miss Gotleg,

I had the good fortune to briefly view your exhibition in the Medieval Crypt, and I thank you for your kind invitation to examine the experiments in greater detail.

There are however, one or two details upon which I am slightly confused.
Namely the exact nature of your experiments, the materials you start with, and the character of the results.
Travellers on the great oceans have told of beautiful mermaids, who swim underwater, others insist that these are merely “sea cows” also curiously called “dugongs”, and even in Europe there are said to be Lorelei who lure sailors to their deaths.
In my mind it raises the possibility that one of your creatures may in fact be such a mermaid.

An alchemist named Nicholas Flamel is reputed to have found the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, and it is now believed this has come into the possession of a young man named named Harry Potter. This Stone is said to turn Base Metal into Gold, and also to be the secret of eternal life. There is also speculation that a stone with exactly the opposite properties has been discovered in far off lands.

I cannot help but think that this partly explains the fact that your “Dodo” seems to cause other creatures to faint.

In the crypt there seems to be an eyeball attached to the wall. I have heard tell that an “all seeing eye” was discovered upon one of the pyramids in Egypt , and that this will appear on the dollar bill of the United States .

Another subject of tittle-tattle in the salons concerns the so called “Modern Prometheus”.
As you are no doubt aware in the ancient Greek legends, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and brought it down to man, and many see this as being a parable for giving the spark of life to living things. In her notorious “novel” a Miss Mary Shelley (nee Wollstonecraft) has told the most distressing tale of one scientist (a Doctor Victor Frankenstein) who attempted to bring inanimate flesh to life using a form of lightning (which I believe is the basis for this new-fangled electricity).

I therefore ask myself whether you are experimenting with giving life to your specimens.

We have all heard of Mister Charles Darwin and Msieu Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who postulate that living things may “evolve” over time into different forms, and each of these two amateur naturalists has their own explanation how this state of affairs comes about.

I look forward to hearing more about your results, and hope that they may soon be as widely known and recognized as the efforts of these “Men of Science”.

Yours, Rural Dean Ipzper