Agssiz accepted with delight his friend's proposition, and toward the end of October, 1827, he and Braun left Carlsruhe together for the University of Munich. His first letter to his brother is given in full, for though it contains crudities at which the writer himself would have smiled in after life, it is interesting as showing what was the knowledge possessed in those days by a clever, well-informed student of natural history. TO HIS BROTHER AUGUSTE. MUNICH, November 5, 1827. . . .At last I am in Munich. I have so much to tell you that I hardly know where to begin. To be sure that I forget nothing, however, I will give things in their regular sequence. First, then, the story of my journey; after that, I will tell you what I am doing here. As papa has, of course, shown you my last letter, I will continue where I left off. . . From Carlsruhe we traveled post to Stuttgart, where we passed the greater part of the day in the Museum, in which I saw many things quite new to me; a llama, for instance, almost as large as an ass. You know that this animal, which is of the genus Camelus, lives in South America, where it is to the natives what the camel is to the Arab; that is to say, it provides them with milk, wool, and meat, and is used by them, moreover, for driving and riding. There was a North American buffalo of immense size; also an elephant from Africa, and one from Asia; beside these, a prodigious number of gazelles, deer, cats, and dogs; skeletons of a hippopotamus and an elephant; and lastly the fossil bones of a mammoth. You know that the mammoth is no longer found living, and that the remains hitherto discovered lead to the belief that it was a species of carnivorous elephant. It is a singular fact that some fishermen, digging recently on the borders of the Obi, in Siberia, found one of these animals frozen in a mass of ice, at a depth of sixty feet, so well preserved that it was still covered with hair, as in life. They melted the ice to remove the animal, but the skeleton alone remained complete; the hide was spoiled by contact with the air, and only a few pieces have been kept, one of which is in the Museum at Stuttgart. The hairs upon it are as coarse as fine twine, and nearly a foot long. The entire skeleton is at St. Petersburg in the Museum, and is larger than the largest elephant. One may judge by that what havoc such an animal must have made, if it was, as its teeth show it to have been, carnivorous. But what I would like to know is how this animal could wander so far north, and then in what manner it died, to be frozen thus, and remain intact, without decomposing, perhaps for countless ages. For it must have belonged to a former creation, since it is nowhere to be found living, and we have no instance of the disappearance of any kind of animal within the historic period. There were, besides, many other kinds of fossil animals. The collection of birds is very beautiful, but it is a pity that many of them are wrongly named.