FROM THE CENTER FOR THER ADVANCEMENT OF PERIPHERAL THOUGHT

HARVARD RESEARCH OVERCOMES DEATH?  NOT SO!  AND NOT SO FAST!

Professor Lemuel Gulliver visited Luggnagg in 1720, and found the seemingly immortal (but senile) Struldbrugs.  After Professor Gulliver's death, his research was published in 1726, in an abridged, sensational, and unprofessional narrative account, by Dr. Jonathan Swift as Gulliver's Travels.  

Without mentioning Professor Gulliver--and without access to the whole of Professor work--Harvard University professors have recently conducted research related to Professor Gulliver's work.

On 20 November 2013 The Boston Globe headlined "Harvard Study Shows that Nuts May Reduce Risk of Death."  On 21 November 2013 The Harvard Gazette headlined a front-page story from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, "Nut Consumption Reduces Risk of Death."

A full and thorough study of Dr. Gulliver's manuscript  has recently been undertaken by members of the Institute for Speculative Science at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought.  Careful analysis of Dr. Gulliver's notes from his "Travels to Various Lands" reveals much earlier  evidence about the life-extending properties of nuts, particularly of peanuts, which grew in abundance on Luggnagg.

Harvard University's researchers claim to have evidence that eating nuts "Reduces the Risk of Death." Dr. Gulliver did not propose anything so preposterous.  As Dr. Gulliver's notes indicate, even though he saw no evidence of Struldbrugs dying or having died, his experience on Luggnagg was not long enough for him to claim immortality for them.

Dr. Gulliver was a famous linguist as well as an adventurer and explorer.  In his travel journals he remarks that the name of the island Luggnagg might be translated as the land of the "immortal" or the "undying," but could also be understood as meaning the land of the "old and whiney.  His notes translate the previously undefined word struld or ztruld as "nut," struldup or ztruldup as "nut-tree," and struldbrug or ztruldbrug as "nut-eater."

Upon his return from his travelsd, Dr. Gulliver began to organise and edit his notes for publication.  In 1723, working an an independent scholar in Dublin Ireland, he met Dr. Swift, who was then Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral and a man opf letters.  Upon Dr. Gulliver's withdrawal into senescence in 1725--perhaps due to an extended experimental diet of nuts--Dr. Swift undertook the publication of extracts from Dr. Gulliver's notes.  These notes were presented to rge world in 1726 as  Lemuel Gulliver's Travels to Various Lands.

The Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought has come to possess all of Dr. Gullivers surviving notes from his travels.  They will be published in meticulously unannoted form.

Previous work undertaken in the Institute for Speculative Science on peanuts includes the important and highly acclaimed paper published in 1974 concerning peanuts. bananas, dinosaurs, and squirrels.  We take this opportunity to quote from the synopsis of that study:

     "As is well known, the age of dinouaurs was brought to an end in the Great Ice Age.  Recent
     studies undertaken at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought show that the
     dinosaurs did not die out in the Great Ice Age--as has long been supposed--but rather shrank
     and grew fur.

     "Dinosaurs were herbivores, who lived mostly on bananas.  Dinosaurs had notoriously bad
     eyesight, and also had difficulty bending over.  Bananas were their favorite food because
     they were brightly colored and grew at the tops of tall trees.

     "When the Great Ice Age came, the bananas went underground to keep from freezing.
     Over time, they shrunk, and their bright yellow peels turned into little brown shells.  The
     fruit inside the shells became hard.

     "The dinosaurs shrank, due to the reduction in the mass of their food supply, and they grew fur
     stay warm.  Researchers speculate that thanks to the intensified supply of nutrition in their new
     food, the eyesight of these small, furry dinosaurs improved radically, which enabled them to
     follow the slender tendrils from the banana trees to where their fruit had gone underground.
     And they ate the shrunken, hard-shelled little bananas which we have learned to call peanuts.

     "Forensic scientists at the Institute for Speculative Science have studied skeletal dinosaur remains          and pictorial representations derived from those skeletons in comparison to modern squirrels.
     From their work--and that of anatomists, nutritionists, and artists--they have derived the
     evolutionary equation

                                             Sq(b)=(p)D.

    "They are now testing that equation, expecting to demonstrate that when one feeds bananas to
     squirrels and peanuts to dinosaurs the results will turn the one into the other."


                                                                    Bert G. Hornback
                                                                    Secretary
                                                                    The Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought