Honored Sir.

I take the liberty of sending you an extract entire, from the “Louisville (Kentucky) Commercial of 15.1.74”, (just sent me by my eldest brother), and will ask you if you are the “Dr. Darwin” mentioned therein: and of asking what is the “Golden Secret”?¹ I read the/your name when a boy—(& am now 50)—of course, & always ‘wondered’. I know the idea on which your present great renown rests—only superficially, I must confess, however; for I have been always inclined to such, as the only “skylight” I could see in “a’ this muddle”,—Nature and thus, I needed no demonstration—and I bid you and your Idea the very heartiest “God-speed!” possible.

I am a graduate of West Point, (1847) a ‘retired’ officer of the Ordnance Corps, and a Physicist, durch liebe.² I profess to have the idea—which is as weighty, physically, as yours is, psychically—that “all atoms revolve”. To demonstrate this truth visibly—to the bodily eye—is the aim of my life, now. It has other things in its train, of which there is no need to speak— I have been, long, drawn to write you, but had no decent excuse. And I now embrace this bit of a one, to hold my open palm to you—contrary to my practise, as to the English I have met—as becomes the younger man, to his bigger, elder, brother-Naturforscher.³

You—of “Beagle” memory—were often mentioned to me in 1840–5, by Dr. Hunter, of Kentucky,⁴ always, with honor. He was “a most remarkable man”—see Dickens, for explanation of this adjective in America⁵—and many thought him ‘cracked’, but not I.

You may recollect to have heard of “Symmes’s Hole”, in its day. My father died in "29. If my “demonstration” is ever made, as I hope to make it, it will also show the truth or falsity of his inferences as to the Earth’s Crust. Excuse me that I “speak in riddles”. I know that I am talking to “a fellow of infinite”—patience.

Respectfully | Jno. Cleves Symmes | Capt. U.S. Army.

P.S. To correct the point. The first John Cleves Symmes, who owned all the land between the two Miami rivers, and founded Cincinnati thereon, was my father Jno. Cleves Symmeses Uncle; & also father-in-law to President Harrison.⁶