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LIFE OF MATTHEW FONTAINE MAURY.

as fellow labourers, and most valuable ones too, in the great cause. I do not (allow me again to say) read in the accounts you send me of what Captain Meade is represented to have said concerning the system of meteorological observations which he is about to inaugurate on the lakes, anything which was intended, or that is calculated to damp, your efforts in behalf of a system of daily weather reports by telegraph to some central office on the lakes. In that account no allusion is made to the telegraph. If, however, Captain Meade should wish to engraft any such feature upon his plan, I hope you will lend him a hearty co-operation, for I should consider it most fortunate if the telegraphic plan should fall into the hands of gentlemen so capable of taking charge of it, and of bringing it into satisfactory operation, as are those of either Captain Meade or of his brother-in-law, Colonel Graham.

Respectfully, &c.,

M. F. Maury.

To Capt. E. P. Dorr,
Buffalo, N. Y.

A letter from E. P. Dorr, written to a relative after Maury's death, enclosed the above letter for publication; and deserves insertion here, because it gives the illustrious hydrographer the credit that is so justly due to him:—

Buffalo, Feb. 1873

. . . . I send you a copy of an original letter written to me by the late M. F. Maury on December 28th, 1858. The circumstances calling it out were these. He came here and lectured during that month and year, and called on the writer, who was then President of the Lake Board of Underwriters, having, at all the principal cities around the lakes, marine inspectors or surveyors subject to my orders. Maury unfolded to me his plan in substance as set forth in this letter, and asked me to aid him. He wanted to "discuss" the observations daily at Washington, as they now are. . . . His intelligent, original mind invented and suggested the present system of meteorological observations; and the writer wishes this in some way to be put upon record, to do justice