Your Excellency’s letter was duly received by the hands of Mr. ——. Accept my thanks for these lines, for this new token of your constant kindness to me. The bearer is for the present immersed in the abyss of my archives. As soon as I shall return from Hanover, where an invitation will detain me a few days,^[94] to seek him out, awaiting further developments at the hand of time, like the people at the gate of the oracle.

Analogies lead me from deep to lower deep, and then I descend from the archives to the bottom of the sea. How am I to obtain the map of which you wrote? When I inquired for it in Gotha, some time ago, the inquiry was futile. So I return to the source, ever rich and bounteous, of whom I subscribe myself the most grateful and obedient