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year in the rudeness, which, in such an interregnum, is always observed to creep into the manners of the students; and nobody doubts that under some other name or form they will reappear and be again crushed.
I did not mean, my dear Edward, to have written you such an alarming epistle, and you will perhaps repent having set my pen going on a subject where it is so much easier to be voluble than amusing.
But this is your affair; and, good or bad, it is a double letter, and I shall expect two in return. . . . . Do you think of me sometimes as the sun sets behind the Brookline hills?
We have a sunset here, too, and I never see it without thinking how often we have admired it together from the Mall.
Farewell,
Geo. T.
To Dr. Walter Channing.
GoTtingen, May 17, 1816.
. . . . You ask me a great many questions about Blumenbach, and I imagine you have received anticipated answers to them, for in several letters to you and to other friends I have said a great deal about him. He is the first man in the University, past all doubt, whether in relation to his original talents, to the vast variety and accuracy of his knowledge, or to his influence over the other professors and with the government, and his general knowledge of the world and of men. . . . . His collections in all the different branches of natural history are very remarkable; the most curious is that of one hundred and seventy-three skulls, of all ages, countries, and people, which he has brought together to illustrate his doctrines respecting the human anatomy, and which are arranged with philosophical neatness in a room to which his family have well given the name of Golgotha.
It is extremely amusing, as well as instructive, to hear the old gentleman pour out his learning and enthusiasm in explaining the advantages of the collection, and the distinctive peculiarities of each of its members.
‘What can be more beautiful,’ said he, day before yesterday, ‘than the fair forehead and Grecian nose of that Circassian,—what can be more deformed than the wide interval between the eyes of that Calmuck and the projecting chin of that Hottentot,—or what more loathsome than the low sensuality expressed in the sharp projection of the upper jaw of that Jew?’
The marks he pointed out were certainly all there; but it is impossible to go into the details of this system here. . . . .