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a fair idea to a person of some knowledge of Geology Palaeantology, Mineralogy about the extent and value of the same and you may therefrom come to a conclusion as to its being suited or not for your purpose. The next question would be the quality of specimens, which could be only solved by looking at them, which in the present state the collections are in, is almost impossible. Each specimen is wrapped up in paper and to unfold and pack up again the many thousand specimens, would be too big a job.

To come to a point the most practical [insert: way] would be (after you have found the collections suitable from the descriptions I send,) to [--illegible--] ship the collections to you and to come out myself to arrange the same, a labor which no one could [insert: do] as well as myself; all what I would ask would be my RR fare both ways and board. The labels often become injured by the fading of the ink and it would be a difficult and tedious task to rewrite the same for another person.

The history of the collections is as follows. I studied Geology & Mineralogy as a speciality over 40 years ago at Tubingen Germany under Professor Quenstedt, after which I made collections of [--illegible--] fossils and minerals for the British Museum of London and the museums of Vienna