Publication InformationFlorence Mch 18 71

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Dear Baird

I send you, for your better instruction, a project of a law, as we foreigners foolishly say instead of bill, whereby we propose the purpose to regulate our fisheries.

I accept not thy excuse for supressing the names of authors consulted. "disfigure the page," quotha! Then put a list of all consulted at the beginning or end. Funny offer that of yours, to tell folks where you got your facts if they will write & ask you. Is Mr Kamininikoff of Petropavlowsk in Kamtschatka, when he read in you Jenks has discovered so & so" to wait till he can write

are the title & date of Jenk's book, before he can order it? Come, come, thou are as bad as Jedediah Cleishbotham about the French quotation, & if thou hast forgotten that worthy, ask thy daughter Lucy.

I have not yet rec'd any number of Harpers, but they will soon come I doubt not, as I have given proper orders.

My eyes are very bad, but I hope not bad as this oculist makes them. He taboos reading & writing absolutely, & indefinitely as to time, but a man who for seventy years (I was three score and ten last Wednesday) has lived eye work & eye work, cannot obey such orders as these. Well good bye to you all

Yours trulyG P Marsh

Prof S Baird

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I send you Giglioli's pamphlets. Distrib.della Fauna etc---

Characteristic dodge that of Congress to allow you to do certain work at your own cost & charges

I have seen none of the Reports of the Smithsonian of later date than 1859. Have not such been published during the last ten or twelve years--?

As to the case of Kamininikoff & others in his like predicament, he begs me to observe that he don't want to know the title of Jenk's book, to test your use of him, but as you do not quote Jenks says, he wants the book to learn more on the subject

References in this letter:

Pseudonym used by Sir Walter Scott in his Tales of my Landlord (1816-1832).

Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, Note intorno alla distribuzione della fauna vertebrata nell'oceano. Florence: G. Civelli, 1870.

Harper's Magazine. New York: 1850-present. Monthly.

Beginning in 1846, annual reports were submitted to Congress by the Smithsonian Institution. Originally limited to the business of the Board of Regents, they developed into a series of reports on research and lectures in different branches of knowledge. They were published as goverment documents and distributed to learned societies.