The beads found in Western Africa are described as net with only at depths [...] to surface of the ground, and under other circumstances, which render it improbable that they can have been introduced by Span. and Port. Commerce, and besides, according to the accounts I have seen, they do not resemble, closely enough, any thing to be Venetian, to be necessarily or even probably from that source.

I have in Rome no books relating to the Venetian glass--all I have being at Florence--nor any means of personally investigating the subject. I therefore send your letter to Consul Harris of Venice with a request that he attend to it. There are several Italian gentlemen who are very full of information on such subjects, but I know none at Rome, & nothing could be accomplished by writing. I hope to see one of them a Florentine--soon & will talk with him

Prof Baird

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Publication Information A machine readable version of a letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD, dated January 5, 1876, electronically published by The University of Vermont. It was electronically published with funding by The Woodstock Foundation, Woodstock, Vermont, as part of a project managed by Elizabeth H. Dow, with Ellen Mazur Thomson as the Project Archivist, and a generous donation of time and expertise by Ralph H. Orth, Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont, as transcriber and consultant. John Thomas, Ellen Thomson and Ralph H. Orth transcribed the text which Ellen Thomson encoded using the Model Editions Partnership SGML tag set through a program developed for the project by James P. Tranowski. This document, file gpmsfb760105, is copyrighted by the University.
The original document, the letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD, written in English, is located at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C. Access to the original document is restricted.

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