Dear Miss Coutts
We last night enjoyed ourselves under your kindness and I thank you heartily for the enjoyment & your kind note - My wife was not able to go for she is not strong - and she thanks you very much for your remaining offer. We do not often go to the theatre and I have no doubt that your concurrent kindness makes it more tempting than any attraction the theatre would have of itself[.]
Mr Barlow has told me of your munificence at Oxford & the thought that you & Mr. Pengelly2 have of speaking (by him) of it & the fossils here3. I shall rejoice if we can profit intellectually by the matter & equally rejoice if we can in any way be useful in so forwarding instruction in however minor a degree. We know with whom we trust in trusting you & Mr. Pengelly and are sure that any thing resulting cannot be wrong to Oxford minds. However I know so little of University feeling that I have no right to say a word upon such a point[.]
Ever Your Very faithful Servant | M. Faraday
I think of Mrs. Brown whenever I write to you but my memory is so treacherous that it renders me afraid & I hesitate.- If with you may I send my kindest remembrances | MF.
PENGELLY, William (1860): “On the Devonian Fossils of Devon and Cornwall, with special reference to the Collection presented to the Oxford University Museum, in connexion with the Burdett-Coutts Geological Scholarship”, Proc. Roy. Inst., 3: 263-8.
Please cite as “Faraday3718,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday3718