Publication InformationSmithsonian Institution,Washington, D.C. January 21, 1875.

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Dear Mr Marsh.

Your letter of the 29 of December reached me, just as we were about going to a little party at Mr Edmunds. Besides the various members of the family, whom we found in good health, we met quite a party of Vermont people.

Thanks for the order on Scribner, Armstrong & Co., which I shall send to them soon to claim the book. I have no doubt I shall find occasion to read a good deal of it.

Lucy is delighted with the numbers of the Metropolitan Bulletin, & will welcome the new number when it comes.

I hope to send you in a few weeks my Second Report as Fish Commissioner, a volume of about 800 pages, & a very important one practically. It contains many elaborate papers on the shad, salmon & other food fishes, with explanations of the best methods of hatching the fish, & the proper construction of fish-ways & fish ladders.

I am also finishing my index for the Annual

Record of Science & Industry for 1874, which will be a considerable improvement on the last volume. Besides the odds & ends of Scientific intelligence, it contains a well digested summary of progress in all the branches of science, filling nearly 200 pages, & prepared by such men as Dr T. Sterry Hunt, Dana, Barker, Gill, Newcomb & Abbe & others.

Very truly Yours.Spencer F. BairdHon. Geo. P. Marsh.U.S. Minister,Rome,Italy.

References in this letter:

George Franklin Edmunds (1828-1919) began his career practicing law in Burlington. He served in the Vermont State House of Representatives and in the State Senate. In 1866 he was elected to the United States Senate as a Republican to fill the vacancy caused by Solomon Foot's death and served for four terms. He resigned in 1891. Edmunds was married to Susan Edmunds, the daughter of Marsh's sister and Wyllys Lyman, his Burlington friend.

U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Report of the Commissioner for 1872 and 1873: inquiry into the decrease of the food-fishes; the propagation of food-fishes in the waters of the United States. Washington, DC, 1874. (Misc. docs. 42nd Congress, 3rd session, Senate, no. 74).

Annual Record of Science & Industry 1871-1878. 8 vols. New York, Harper & Bros., 1872-1879. This series was a continuation of the Annual of Scientific Discovery. Baird edited the publication with the assistance of eminent scientists of the day.

Thomas Sterry Hunt (1826-1892) was the mineralogist and chemist for the Geological Survey of Canada and later professor of geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor of natural history and geology at Yale, James Dwight Dana (1813-1895) was the foremost geologists of his day.

George Frederick Barker (1835-1910) was a chemist and physicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

An ichthyologist, Theodore Nicholas Gill (1837-1814) was part of Baird's group in the U.S. Fish Commission and was known for his work as a taxonomist and synthesizer. He wrote Catalogue of the Fishes of the East Coast of North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1873.

The most famous astronomer of his day, Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) was superintendent of the Nautical Almanac Office where he made important contributions to planetary theory. He was the author of several popular works on astronomy and economics.

Under the leadership of the meteorologist Cleveland Abbe (1838-1916) the Weather Service of the Signal Corps (later the Weather Bureau) established a laboratory and center for basic research.