126 
incessantly furnishes us, and with which no other family, nor 
person in this Island, has yet been supplied. For the last 
twelve years, we have been indebted to your liberality for an 
exact knowledge of the progress of the human mind; not 
only in science and the arts, but in moral and religious 
feeling: and the light you have communicated, we have 
endeavoured to diffuse in our little sphere. The extensive 
influence of good deeds cannot be estimated. In sending 
me your fine plants, and fruit-trees, and flowers, you did 
not contemplate the blessings you were then communicating 
to the great Island of Madagascar; where your apples, 
pears, and plums, are now in great abundance in the markets 
of the capital, and add to the subsistence, as well as the 
luxuries of a numerous people, and to the countless genera- 
tions which will sueceed them. In our little Island, too, it 
is to you we owe the origin of that taste for the cultivation of 
natural science, which, by its diffusion among the higher 
classes, has enabled us to establish Professorships of Natural 
Philosophy and Botany, and to form a Society of Natural 
History, that may, before long, contribute, in some degree, 
to extend the bounds of that science. You have thus been 
the cause of a great mass of human happiness. To me, our 
correspondence has proved a source of unmixed pleasure 
and satisfaction, and I return to it with j joy, from the turmoil 
of polemical discussion, from which even my obscurity could 
not shelter me, with the passionate zealots of the day. + 
send you, by the Georgiana, in charge of Dr. Wilson of the 
Navy, a new Testament and Catéchiine i-e Madagese 
language, printed at the capital of that great Island a few 
months ago, and which has just arrived. The articles of 
Natural History are embarked on board the Lady Flor 
Capt. Fayrer, who sails in a few days. He is a member 
of the Zoological Society, and a very zealous Naturalist, — 
and will take the greatest care of them. I promised him 22 
introduction to you, which I shall give him before oes 
I think you will find the Poreupine a great beauty ; 
grown ‘Very rapidly with me, and I never saw one $0 des 
or so brilliantly decorate: e The Wombat is- 
