Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Governor Rutherford B. Hayes to Webb C. Hayes, April 19, 1869

COLUMBUS, April 19, 1869.

MY DEAR BOY:—I am sending Uncle a box containing oats and barley and also a small box inside of it with fossil shellfish, a fossil shark's tooth, and a bud, I suppose it is, of a lily fossilized. I visited a small but valuable collection of such things this morning. They were found near here and at Delaware. At Delaware they find bones of enormous fishes of species long since extinct. There are septaria, or large round stones like Uncle's, formed around large fish bones-particularly the bones of the head and the jaws, six and eight feet in diameter! That story will make Uncle open his eyes. Mr. Herzer, the German who gave me the fossils, has a microscope which magnifies three hundred times. A small-sized louse looks as big as a full grown rat, and [a] much more terrible beast than a rat he is with his claws and pinching apparatus.

Affectionately,
R. B. HAYES.
WEBB C. HAYES,
        Fremont.

Private.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, p. 61

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