202
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sweden. And so on. Bush had invented the interview from
beginning to end. That incident had repercussions , and everyone
forgot about me.
Joyce Carol Oates
RABIES AND RACE: AN HYPOTHESIS
Herewith, an account of the somewhat controversial
Fuerst hypothesis,
first presented as a lecture at Princeton, in the
autumn of '98, by that esteemed gentleman of science Dr. Palmer
Fuerst, -whose numerous books and monographs, I am puzzled to
note, are no longer to be found on the shelves of the University
library.
At this time, Dr. Fuerst held the position of President, of the
American Philosophical Society, and was Director of the Boston
Foundation for Scientific Inquiries, having served, for upward of
twenty years, on the science faculty at Harvard . (,Tis my good
fortune that a monograph of "Rabies and Race" is yet to be found,
in one of our rural libraries here in the Hopewell Valley, -else I
should be hard pressed to discover, and to recount, the particulars of
Dr. Fuerst's provocative message!) That he was invited by his
colleagues at Princeton, to address the student body, and the
community in general, testifies, I think, to a commendable
lack oj
rivalrous or bitter jeelings,
betwixt the two great universities,-albeit
that the youthful athletes of Harvard and Princeton may have felt
somewhat differently, owing to a fiercely played football match of the
previous season, when Harvard , as it were , "trounced" Princeton,
in a game thought by numerous disinterested parties , to be unfair.
Since the Boston Foundation for Scientific Inquiries, which
undertook the series of experiments, of which Dr. Fuerst so
Excerpted from
The Crosswicks Horror,
a "Gothic" set in Princeton in 1905-06,
involving Woodrow Wilson , Upton Sinclair, Grover Cleveland , and various
fictitious persons. To be published by E. P. Dutton, Inc.
