text:  Reader do not think that Christopher is too severe! For what but condemnation and contempt can any rational mind conceive for a writer so incapable of dealing with even the rudiments of his subject and yet so presumptuous in the temerity of his ignorance as to declare that "till _now_ not a scintilla of light has appeared on the subject of Etruscan antiquities?" We can pardon learned trifling but when a man wholly unlearned on a subject of the greatest interest to the learned world presumes to dogmatize in this manner we strip him in an instant and have no mercy in exposing to both learned and simple the nakedness of his pretensions