Dear Sir

What a long time I had no news from You and feel that it is all by my own fault. Your last letter to Berlin² came together with another, from Paris, stating the arrest of my brother in law, my wife was so alarmed at the position of her sister left alone, that we took the same evening the train to Paris and from that time are staying here trying to do something through our Embassy; I have seen the man nearest to M^r Thiers M^r Barthelemy St. Hilaire and hope to obtain a decree of banishment.³ Happily I have not quite lost my time in Paris, and through the kindness of M^r Gervais⁴ did get access to all the collections of the Paris Museums. In the cellars of the Laboratoire d’Anatomie Comparée I found a large quantity of chests with fossils from Sansan, collected by Lartet, and seeing among them many bones of Anchiterium resolved to study this genus nearer than it was done by Blainville.⁵ By and by the quantity of bones found in different places grew very large, a block of stone proved to contain the whole head (quite unknow till now) and gradually I came to the idea of publishing a monography of Anchiterium as a first essay in Palaeontology.⁶ M^r Gervais gave the permission to publish the description of all they have and I am now very busy comparing bones of Palaeoth. Hipparion and horse with my Anchiterium.⁷ I have the animal nearly complete, as good as a living one and a head though crushed but with a full dentition: six molars in each jaw, the seventh coming into place, and three permanent premolars in both jaws quite formed and ready to push the milk premolars out. I think it is the most precious head any collection can boast, fancy only 40 molars beautifully preserved in one head; I have exposed the 12 permanent premolars by breaking the outer wall of both jaws. The animal is very curious presenting a mixed type of horse and Palaeoterium; the head is quite Palaeotherian, the extremities, the carpus and tarsus are hippoid but still with Palaeoterian affinities, so the large metacarpal (the 3^d.) is hippoid in his upper part and quite Palaeotherian in the lower, the articular surface for the phalangi beeing quite the same as in Palaeotherium with the middle ridge extending over only one half of the lower articular head and not on the whole as in Hipparion and horse.⁸ Notwithstanding all this the French are dead against You and I must really mitigate my Darwinisme not to irritate them.⁹

Still you have here a great friend of Your views, this is M^r Gaudry but even he dares not to do it openly as “le Darwinisme est en mauvaise odeur au Jardin des Plantes”.¹⁰ But even M^r Gaudry is opposed to my views of making from the Anchiterium a transitional type between Palaeotherium and horse, saying that one has quite an omnivorous the other a ruminant dentition, but I hope that a series of milk teeth in the happiest state (worn down so as to present the two crescents characteristic for ruminants) will help us over this difficulty.¹¹ Before going to print I shall certainly see You an take Your opinion on the matter.

But my letter is getting to long, I hope to have some lines from You, my best compliments to M^rs Darwin and the ladies¹² | Your truly | W. Kowalevsky

Have You read Kupfer’s “Verwandschaft zwischen Ascidien und Wirbelthiere” in the second number of the Archiv für Mikroskopische Anatomie for 1870, it will greatly interest You.¹³