
          72
Amherst. April 22d. 1824.

Dear friend,

As you have now become
"like one of us, knowing good and evil," I
hope you will soon be freed from the
fits of derangement which are so strongly imprinted
on some of the letters with which you
have lately honored me. In your last you
attempt to reply to my remark on the subject
of the geological enterprise of the Troy Lyceum,
as being first and establishing principles which
have directed all subsequent written, though they
are unwilling to acknowledge it. Instead of answering 
these remarks, you imagine that it was plants
I meant, not rocks. Therefore you say, ironically
say you will do us justice hereafter and say that
we brought to light all you publish in the Flora.
You semed to have greatly chafed yourself about
it, and to have written and scratched some tremendous
anathema. Now do read my letters before
you answer them. I have received replies to more 
than 50 subjects upon which Inever wrote you,
within two years. I never made any pretensions
to any discoveries in botany, nor in any thing
else but geology. So far from regretting the publication
of the two editions of my geology,
no act of my life is a source of so much
gratification to me. It contais the elements
of all which has been [appeared?] in our country [added: on that subject] since
its appearance. The sensitive part will withstand
all the criticisms of knaves, fools and more of sense
while an undecomposed work is left in New England.
The secondary part is defective, as I acknowledged
in the last edition. How many upstarts have figured
[away] in materials drawn from that little book,
        