RK-254

Boston March 4th 1857

Robert Kennicot Esq

Dear Sir

Your esteemed favor had been by me several days and I have been unable, until now, to answer it at the length I wished to do, until now. Since I last wrote you very important, and I may add, very agreable changes have taken place in my position and busines re lations, which while, at present, they take up a great deal of my time, may ultimately lead to additional facilities in the study of my favorite branches of pursuit. I have with drawn altogether from an active connection with politics and the editing of newspapers and shall probably never resume again the wearing occupation of an editor of a daily newspaper or any paper. Since the opening of the year I have been a partner in the publishing

[page turned, stamped in lower left corner] J. Kennicott Brenton Collections

house of Hickling, Swan and (now) Brew er. We publish altogether works of an educational character. I send you a copy of our descriptive cat alogue, and if you find on our list any you would like and feel am bitious to review in the columns of the of the Prairie Farmer, I will take great pleasure in sending them to you. By the way will you please send my Prairie Farmer directed to me care of H. S & B. instead of the Atlas. I shall be more sure of receiving it and I do not wish to lose a copy. I retain my interest in the Atlas as usual, but have relinquished the labor of the tread mill to other feet than mine.

As to the owls egg – taint the short ^long eared and tis the long eared if there is any believing the correlative evidence of Audubon, Bryant

and Cabot as to its being just like ^{very unlike} the eggs of short-eared owls, and of Wilson, Trudeau, [Illegible] & [Illegible] as to its being just like the long eared. Bryant & Cabot last summer fully identified the short eared owls eggs. They agree with Audubon & all others I have seen as new descriptions of Wilson, [Illegible], [Illegible] and Trudeau have all prifessed to have found the eggs of long-eared and they are all just like your egg – only, and that is unfortunate, I admit, they were not laid on the ground.

So please, next summer, solve this problem!

I have packed up Prof. Gillis's work for you and shall tomorrow send it to my friend Field ([Illegible] & F.) who has promised me to see it forwarded. We have been expecting to send some packages to Chicago or I would

have sent it before.

I am very glad to learn that you have organised, in Chicago an Aca demy of Natural Sciences and I wish you all possible success.

I am also very happy to learn that you are to obtain employment - I trust a lucractive one - in connection with the North-Western University of Evanstown, and shall be very happy if the connection shall prove as pleasant, every way, as you anticipate. Is it not a new institution. I can find no mention of it in our lists of universities.

I see you are soon to go into southern Illinois, where, I doubt not, you will obtain many vari ties and also gather much [illegible] information in regard to the dis tribution of our birds &c.

My friend Laurence writes me that he too is in correspondence with you and hopes to derive much advantage from interchanging with you. By the way L. is a queer man about [illegible] things. He is disposed I think to exaggerate his own doings and to under

value the aid he obtains from others. A few days ago he wrote me laying claim to having first publicly announced the [illegible] [illegible] as an Ameri can bird, when it had been, 18 years before, described & figured in Nuttalls work as one of the birds of Long Island. He claimed too the ^first knowledge of Fosters Tern, which is only a synonym of Bonaparte’s Sterna Wilsoni, of which I had several times made public mention before Mr L. suspected it was different from Sterna hirundo – which by the way is by no means certain. This is a pity and makes his intercourse less pleasant than it would be if it were not for this pe culiarity. Cassin and he have ceased to correspond. Excuse me for writing you all this but I thought I would do as I would be done by, that you might be on your guard as to your new correspondent. As to collecting nests