Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD, dated July 13, 1858.
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Dear Baird
I am much obliged to you for the books which came safely this morning, & sorry to be obliged to trouble you further. The missing ones will no doubt turn up, as I remember seeing them all, or nearly all, with the rest, the last time I was at Washington, but they are not of enough present importance to me to make it worth-while to have them sent now, even if found.
As to Bosworth's Anglo-
Saxon Dictionary, I
want to make an inquiry, I think it has been in the hands of a rogue, & I
should be glad to know whom.
The preliminary matter, introduction, history of the language c, amounting to near 200 pp or near as I can recollect, has been . I find pencil notes in a fly leaf at the end in a hand-writing I don't know. Perhaps you will recognize it, & this may lead to the knowledge of the culprit. I cut out part of the fly-leaf & enclose it herewith.
I suppose the chance of
recovering the lost part (which is quite valuable) is
about nix, but I should like to know who prigged it, as a matter of .
What a portentous affair that Dudley now is! Did
you ever! I would catch Alcott, make an' otomy of
him, & put him in one of your glass cases. I suppose Gould will name a star after him or some such place, & so immortalise him. I don't know what there is
to say on the Trustees' side, but, taking the case as I hear it reported, it seems
to me one of the most absurd follies
on their part ever committed.
I hope Mary is better again. My wife remains comfortable, which is saying a good deal, & can walk & write a little but not much. I am glad for Gilliss, but a little anxious about Payta, which I have a notion is a pesky, pizon, sneaky, feverish place. Many thanks for Guyot's Tables.
Yours trulyG P Marsh
Prof Baird
References in this letter:
Joseph Bosworth, A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language. London: Longman etal, 1838.
A botanist, William Russell Dudley (1849-1911) taught at Cornell and Stanford University.
Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), New England transcendentalist and educator, was superintendent of the Concord public schools.
A conchologist, Addison Augustus Gould (1805-1866), worked on the shells collected by expeditions supported by the Smithsonian. He founded the Boston Society of Natural History and was an original member of the National Academy of Sciences.
A conchologist, Addison Augustus Gould (1805-1866), worked on the shells collected by expeditions supported by the Smithsonian. He founded the Boston Society of Natural History and was an original member of the National Academy of Sciences.
James Melville Gilliss (1811-1865) was both a naval officer and astronomer. He was responsible for proposing and supervising the building of Naval Observatory in Washington, DC (1842-1844). In 1846 he was assigned to the U.S. Coast Survey and spent several years in Chile conducting astronomical observations. The Gilliss family, based in Washington, became close friends of the Marshes and the Bairds.
A city in Peru, located 600 miles northeast of Lima.
Swiss-American, Arnold Henry Guyot (1807-1884), taught physical geography and geology at Princeton University. Under Smithsonian Institution auspices, he set up a system of weather observatories that utimately grew into the U. S. Weather Bureau. His barometric tables, published as A Collection of Meteorological Tables, with other tables useful in practical meteorology, published by the Smithsonian in 1852, were very influential. Guyot's contribution to physical geography, Earth and Man (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1849) inspired Marsh, despite Marsh's disagreements with some of its premises.