7 July 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00633)
Look in the library—any late work on paleontology will furnish the facts. I got mine from an article in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal (have lost it since.)1explanatory note
It wd be a good idea to print such an article in the same issue with mine.
On 4 July, Orion had written in regard to Clemens’s “Brace of Brief Lectures on Science”: “I had some notion in relation to the scientific lectures to comment editorially, taking extracts from the books to verify your statements if you will let me know where they came from. I like them, but people will think you made the whole thing, maybe—text as well as commentary” (CU-MARK). Orion did in fact comment, drawing his information from Louis Figuier’s Primitive Man (1870), which had been reviewed and extracted at length in Chamber’s Journal for 13 August 1870, Clemens’s source (21 June 71 to Bliss, nn. 2, 4click to open letter; OC 1871; “Our Earliest Ancestors,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art 47:521–24).
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L4 , 429–430.
see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.