CORRESPONDENCE WITH DR. MANTELL. 207 



a vain curiosity, but by a deep interest in your painful case. 

 How I wish I had your new work to accompany me to 

 Baltimore, where I shall, I trust, be, when this letter reaches 

 you, and in which city I am pledged to begin a course of 

 geology in ten lectures, on ten evenings, the first of which 

 will (D. v.) be March 4th, Monday, and so on in the alternate 

 evenings of the successive three weeks, to end March 25th. 

 If it is possible for a copy of your work or any part of it in 

 sheets to reach me there in March, I should have great 

 pleasure, and no doubt a 1 vantage, in glancing over your 

 pages and your beautiful illustrations ; and I should not 

 fail, nor shall I at any rate fail, to give you due honor 



before an intelligent and polished community I 



am glad to observe that you view your afflictions in their 

 moral bearing ; may God in his infinite mercy make them 

 available not as of merit, but as moral agents for your 

 final salvation through the Redeemer. I am, although in 

 perfect health and with the physical and mental energy 

 of early days, admonished by the rolling years, by my 

 spreading family, now becoming numerous in the second 

 generation, and more than all by the dropping of friends 

 around me like autumnal leaves, that my own time is com- 

 ing. God grant that come when or how it may, I may be 

 found ready ! Your kind and most beneficial exertions in 

 favor of Dr. Deane, were mentioned with gratitude in my 

 last letter, and ere this you have no doubt received his own 

 warm acknowledgments. I am very much obliged, as well 

 as he and our American geologists generally. When you 

 see Lord Northampton and Dr. Buckland, be pleased to 

 present my thanks to them for the generous course they 

 pursued 



FROM DR. MANTELL. 



May 21, 1844. 



I HAVE this moment written the last word in my " Medals 

 of Creation," and with the same pen address you, a pleasure 



