The translations of Bowring, and a special interest in the works of Mickiewicz, determined the career of James Gates Percival.[19] He was born near Hartford, Connecticut, in 1795 and was graduated from Yale in 1815. A student of languages, a poet of stature, an excellent geologist, Percival was eccentric and somewhat of a recluse. His works attracted little more than local interest and were soon forgotten. He finally became the state geologist of Connecticut and later of Wisconsin, where he died in 1856. For more than twenty years, though, he had done Polish translations and contributed articles on Polish literature and history to various periodicals. Some of these were little more than a rewriting of articles published in European journals, for Percival knew ten languages and was abreast of European developments. His knowledge of Polish was not too thorough, but at the period he influenced a group known as the “Connecticut Wits” and is a good example of the American interests of the time. A more substantial contributor was the better known Talvj,[20] the author of the _Historical View of the Languages and Literatures of the Slavonic Nations_. This was the first survey of the Slavic literatures after the works of Safarik. Talvj had a remarkable career. Her real name was Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob. She was born in Halle, Germany in 1797, where her father, Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob, was a professor at the University of Halle. In 1807 he was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Kharkov. Therese soon became a competent linguist, began to translate the novels of Sir Walter Scott into German, and in 1825 published in German a collection of the _Volkslieder der Serben_, again in response to an interest in the Serb folksongs. In 1828 she married Edward Robinson, an American Congregational minister and scholar who was then a professor in the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Robinson was much interested in Biblical archaeology, edited a popular religious journal, the _Biblical Repository_, and spent considerable time in the Biblical lands. He published his wife’s work on Slavic literature in this journal. In 1850 it was issued in book form. When Robinson died in 1863, Talvj (her pen name was taken from the first letters of her name) returned to Germany. She died in 1870 in Hamburg. Talvj’s book was probably the outstanding work on the Slavs done by a non-Slav in the first half of the century. Unfortunately it attracted little attention even though it was much sounder than were many of the studies written as much as a half century later. It received due recognition only after Slavic studies in the Anglo-Saxon world had begun to find themselves and had shown a certain independence of thought.