By virtue of his office, the governor of Virginia was president of the Board of Directors of the Literary Fund. After succeeding Preston as governor, Thomas Mann Randolph transmitted this letter and its enclosures to Linn Banks, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, with a 4 Jan. 1820 covering letter in which he observed that he and his fellow directors “experience satisfaction at the progress of the University, besides the honor they foresee to the authority which upholds it from the certain advancement of learning and science in the state: in the anticipation of the effect the annual diffusion of knowledge must produce, to save the vast waste now made of the efforts of native genius in the pursuit of objects and prosecution of inventions, already attained elsewhere, too far off for the reach of common enquiry: in the important addition, to the primary education now contemplated, of elementary instruction in the theory of the useful arts, and in the principles and mechanism of all the most useful machinery, which the improvement of country teachers, educated themselves at the University, will soon afford, perhaps at diminished cost: and even in the refinement of taste, in the construction of private mansions, which the exhibition, in such considerable variety and dimensions, of the pure models of remote times, that have never ceased to attract the admiration of mankind, cannot fail to create” (Report and Documents for 1819 description begins Report and Documents respecting the University of Virginia, Richmond, 1820, containing a 4 Oct. 1819 report by the Board of Visitors and supporting documents description ends , 3–4).