(2) That the cousin marriage is cause of all the great evils that have afflicted mankind down through the ages.

(3)That the offspring of the cousin marriage is prone to be quarrelsome and warlike.

If you see merit in my plan for world peace, I wish you would give it to your associates and the Press.

3. From a man in New Mexico

Dear Dr. Watson:

Congratulations on your Nobel Prize.

I could not help noticing your remark about the common cold. It does seem odd that so little has been done about this everyday but exasperating ailment.

Strange to say, something already has been done about the common cold. The solution to the problem is already at hand. The trouble is that it is not the solution that most of us have had in mind.

The common cold is largely a man-made disease. To speak more precisely, it occurs only under conditions which man himself has created. I discovered this by accident as it were. During 1948 and 1949 I lived out at camps in the forest near Flagstaff, Arizona, and worked for the U.S. Forest Service. I worked outdoors nearly all the time. During this time, a period of about ten months, I did not have a single cold even though I was exposed to some pretty rough weather. I had the feeling that I was observing something unusual and significant. What I had done was to rediscover a method of climate modification which had been worked out by my ancestors long ago, and then lost. But the method has not been lost at all in the ancestral home, Scotland.

If you are interested, sometime you might read the novels of Sir John Buchan, particularly The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Macnab, or Huntingtower. Notice something. The characters never have any colds. Not Sir Edward Leithen, nor Sir Archibald Roylance, nor Mr. McCunn (the middle-aged wholesale grocer from Glasgow), nor Fish Benjie, nor Mrs. Morran, nor any of the barefoot boys from Glasgow who sing Communist songs to the old Scots tunes. These novels were written in the not so dim and distant 20's. The characters were out in the weather a great deal. Some of the days were beautiful, but most of the time it was cold, or foggy, or raining. But nobody ever has a sniffle in these adventures.

If you are interested in further details and discussions, please let me know. My ideas concerning climate modification are thoroughly unconventional, but they are quite sound, I believe.

4. From two famous political figures. Teddy Kennedy sent a letter, and Governor Volpe wrote:

Dear Doctor Watson:

I would like to convey my sincere congratulations for being named a Nobel laureate for your work in biology.