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