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Chicago, May 27/57
Dear Bob.
I think we had better not buy at present: I dont see how I can give a full expose of season for my opinion without filling my few minutes of time now so full as to delay this letter. The rest here how decidedly the same opinion. Evans wont favor it for the Univ. I proposed it to him this morning.
I have got your insects down: they look
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splendidly. Blaney proposes to keep a part of his minerals in the Laboratory & only send us about 200 specimens of duplicates. Confound him, he neither works nor donates. He gives $50. in money as also do Profs Herrick Davis & Freer. Johnson gives $25. Daniels is again appointed State Geologist of Wis. He will get us a large supply.
I write to day to some Coal mines for fossils.
As to your blues every one is subject
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to them. The best way is to take care of your health and cultivate an habitual evenness so far as possible of temper & spirits. Your exceedingly active nervous system will make this both difficult and necessary Blues will not depart at your command, but you can by proper contrivance divert your attention from them while they last and thus avoid their impressing a gloomy habit upon you. They are generally irregularly intermittent, and alternate with seasons of excessive good spirits: both of them without adequate reasons
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get the mastery of your mind in these respects; Such irregularities predispose to insanity, and where the person does not meet that disaster he is liable to meet with a querulous unhappy old age at the time when his powers begin to fail.
Discipline & habitual control enables an old man to go down to his grave with dignity and something like a setting-sun splendor though his intellect may fail. We ought to have regard to this consideration while we are young, because we may live to be old.
As for you, it will pay for you to cultivate yourself because there
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is something to you and you can make a splendid specimen of yourself.
As a general rule irregularities of feeling spirits are to be treated by diversion rather than by direct resistence, because the will has no direct control over the emotions.
Yours in haste E. Andrews