Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD, dated February 8, 1851.
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My dear boy
We are thus far on our way to the second cataract, just now resting on a sand bank, with serious doubts whether the steamer, which was to take us to Assouan a few miles further, can pass it. I hoped to have heard that you were safely established at Washington and had received the keg (leaky & spoiled I fear), before I sailed from Constantinople, but the last I have received from you was dated just after your appointment to the Smith. Inst. As we came up in a steamboat, I could not stop to make collections, and besides, with the thermometer at 48, asps, geckos, fresh crocodiles eggs, and the like, can't be said to be just in season. "When ice is in, serpents is out," but I have brought along divers jugs of spirits, and as we shall go down leisurely in a country-boat, I hope I shall be able to make some additions to your snakery, after it grows a little warmer. We saw five crocodiles basking on sand banks yesterday, and concluded they might prove ugly customers, if a nearer acquaintance were too assiduously pressed. At Esneh, they told us one lately came ashore there in hot pursuit of an Arab, who only escaped by climbing a tree, and our dragoman says that he saw a horse carried off by one not long since. Of birds there is a great store--water fowl chiefly--[but I think the botany of Egypt cannot offer much, because the whole soil is covered with the cultivated growth. Above the First Cataract there is said to be greater variety. I refer you to Dr. Wislizenus for such vague observations as I have been able to make, but they are too loose to be of much interest.... Write often and full, and make M. do the like, to
Your true friendGeo. P. Marsh.]
References in this letter:
Frederick Adolph Wislizenus (1810-1889), a German born physician, emigrated to the United States in 1835. He published a scientific account of his trip to Chihuahua, Mexico in Memoirs of a Tour to Northern Mexico, Connected with Colonel Doniphan's Expedition in 1846 and 1847. (Washington: Tippin and Streeper, 1848). In 1850 he married Lucy Crane, Caroline Crane Marsh's sister; they settled in St. Louis where he practiced medicine.