At New Haven I passed several days at the house of Professor Silliman, with whom I have been in correspondence for several years. The University (Yale) owes to the efforts of the Professor a fine collection of minerals and extensive physical and chemical apparatus. Silliman is the patriarch of science in America. For thirty years he has edited an important scientific journal, the channel through which, ever since its foundation, European scientific researches have reached America. . .One of his sons-in-law, Mr. Shepard,* (* An error: Mr. Shepard was not the son-in-law of Professor Silliman.--ED.) is also chemical professor in the University of South Carolina. Another, Mr. Dana, still a very young man, strikes me as likely to be the most distinguished naturalist of the United States. He was a member of the expedition around the world under the command of Captain Wilkes, and has just published a magnificent volume containing monographs of all the species of polyps and corals, with curious observations on their mode of growth and on the coral islands. I was surprised to find in the collection at New Haven a fine specimen of the great fossil salamander of Oeningen, the "Homo diluvii testis" of Scheuchzer. From New Haven I went to New York by steamboat. The Sound, between Long Island and the coast of Connecticut, presents a succession of cheerful towns and villages, with single houses scattered over the country, while magnificent trees overhang the sea; we constantly disturbed numbers of aquatic birds which, at our approach, fluttered up around the steamer, only to alight farther on. I have never seen such flocks of ducks and gulls. At New York I hastened to see Auguste Mayor, of whom my uncle will no doubt have given you news, since I wrote to him. Obliged to continue my road in order to join Mr. Gray at Princeton I stopped but one day in New York, the greater part of which I passed with Mr. Redfield, author of a paper on the fossil fishes of Connecticut. His collection, which he has placed at my disposal, has great interest for me; it contains a large number of fossil fishes of different kinds, from a formation in which but one species has been found in Europe. The new red sandstone of Connecticut will also fill a gap in the history of fossil fishes, and this acquisition is so much the more important, because, at the epoch of the gres bigarre, a marked change took place in the anatomical character of fishes. It presents an intermediate type between the primitive fishes of the ancient deposits and the more regular forms of the jurassic deposits.