Letter to Karl Marx, October 2, 1866

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To Marx in London

Manchester, 2 October 1866

Dear Moor,

You did not tell me that you had signed a bill for £46, which was why I sent you half notes for only £40 yesterday; the missing halves follow today, as well as a further five-pound-note I/F 98815, Manchester, 30 January 1865.

Our cashier has not got a second five-pound-note, and it’s too late for a Post Office order, so I cannot include the remaining sovereign; but you will no doubt surmount that difficulty.

Regarding Moilin and Trémaux I will write at greater length in the next few days; I have not quite finished reading the latter yet, but I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing to his whole theory because he knows nothing of geology, and is incapable of even the most common-or-garden literary-historical critique. That stuff about the nigger Santa Maria and the whites turning into Negroes is enough to make one die of laughing. Especially the idea that the traditions of the Senegal niggers necessarily deserve credence, just because these fellows cannot write! In addition, it is another pretty notion of his to ascribe the differences between a Basque, a Frenchman, a Breton, and an Alsatian to the surface-structure, which is, of course, also to blame for the people speaking four different languages.

Perhaps the man will demonstrate in the 2nd volume how he explains that we Rhinelanders on our Devonian transitional massif (which has not been covered again by the sea since long before the coal was formed) did not become idiots and niggers ages ago, or else he will assert that we are really niggers.

The book is utterly worthless, pure theorising in defiance of all the facts, and for each piece of evidence it cites it should itself first provide evidence in turn.

Kindest regards to the Ladies.

Your
F. E.