RC (DLC); endorsed by TJ as received 4 Nov. 1796 and so recorded in SJL.

Your letter: TJ to Barton, 10 Oct. 1796. The Posthumous Work was the Marquis de Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris, 1795), recently published in the United States as Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind: being a Posthumous Work of the late M. de Condorcet (Philadelphia, 1796). See Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, Washington, D.C., 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends No. 1247.

The German-born scientist Peter Simon Pallas, who spent most of his career working under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, made significant contributions to geology, the classification of flora and fauna, and the systematic description of far-flung regions of the Russian empire (DSB description begins Charles C. Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York, 1970–80, 16 vols. description ends ). The great project of comparing and classifying linguistic families by rendering a list of 130 core words in each of 200 languages was a personal project of the Russian Empress, Catherine II. At her request, Pallas published the results of the study as Sravnitel’nye slovari vsiekh iazykov i nariechii, sobrannye desnitseiu vsevysochaishei osoby, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1786–89), which also bore a Latin title and preface although the vocabularies themselves were all printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. George Washington, recruited for the enterprise by the Marquis de Lafayette, had obtained for Catherine translations of the word list in some American Indian languages, but the first edition of the book, as indicated by Barton, did not contain vocabulary from any American nations. Languages from the Americas and Africa were added to a second edition published in four volumes (St. Petersburg, 1790–91), also in the Cyrillic alphabet, which expanded the word list as well as the number of languages covered, but Catherine was so distressed by the scheme of classification and arrangement introduced by her new compiler, Fedor Ivanovich de Mirievo, that she severely curtailed distribution of the second edition. TJ, like Barton, was interested in linguistic evidence that might provide clues to the origins of American Indians and compiled his own set of comparative word lists. He was evidently unaware of the expanded edition of the Russian work until 1806, when he learned of it from a published report by Volney and asked Levett Harris, the American consul in St. Petersburg, to find Pallas’s book. Harris obtained both editions for TJ’s library (Mary Ritchie Key, Catherine the Great’s Linguistic Contribution [Carbondale, Ill., 1980], 51–2, 56–7, 60–70, 73–6; Volney, Rapport fait à l’Academie celtique, sur l’ouvrage russe de M. le professeur Pallas [Paris, 1805?]; TJ to Harris, 18 Apr. 1806, 28 Mch. 1807; Harris to TJ, 10 Aug., 15 Sep. 1806, 24 July 1807). See Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, Washington, D.C., 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends Nos. 4736–7.

Winthrop Sargent had sent the American Philosophical Society artifacts excavated from a burial mound at Cincinnati. Barton’s account of the finds took the form of a letter to Joseph Priestley, 16 May 1796, which was printed that year and also subsequently in the society’s Transactions (Winthrop Sargent and Benjamin Smith Barton, Papers Relative to Certain American Antiquities [Philadelphia, 1796]; APS description begins American Philosophical Society description ends , Transactions, iv [1799], 177–215; APS description begins American Philosophical Society description ends , Proceedings, xxii, pt. 3 [1884], 237, 239). See Evans, description begins Charles Evans, Clifford K. Shipton, and Roger P. Bristol, comps., American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of all Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from … 1639 … to … 1820, Chicago and Worcester, Mass., 1903–59, 14 vols. description ends No. 30038.