If I may call you so—I wish you peace and joy, and many more years in which to
know and feel how great is your fame. We have seldom met, and you will hardly remember
me; but I recall pleasant hours with you in this city, just after the war, and I not
long since came to see you in your home, with Mrs. Coues,2 among the many visitors who
wish to do you homage.—Some of your published expressions lead me to think you
may be in sympathy with the spirit
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of a little tract which I send,3 and which please accept. Should you find time to
glance at it, and find any reflection of thoughts that have passed across the mirror
of your own mind, I should be proud and pleased.
Correspondent:
Elliott Coues
(1842–1899) was born in New Hampshire, the son of Sam Elliott Coues
(1797–1867) and his wife, Charlotte Haven Ladd Coues (1813–1900).
Elliott Coues graduated from Columbian University in D. C., and joined the U.S.
Army as a Medical cadet in 1862, during the American Civil War. He became
Assistant Surgeon and held that rank until he resigned in 1881. After the War,
he worked as a naturalist and professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at
Norwich University (Vermont) and, later, as a professor of Biology at Virginia
Agricultural and Mechanical College. He served as a collaborator at the
Smithsonian Institute in 1875. He edited numerous geological and natural history
publications and contributed several works on ornithology, including Key to North American Birds (1872) and Check-list and Dictionary of North American Birds (1882). Coues also
became a strong advocate for women’s rights (see Paul Russell Cutright and
Michael J. Brodhead, Elliott Coues: Naturalist and Frontier
Historian [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981], especially
Chapter 21, "A New Wife and Women’s Rights"). For more information, see "Coues,
Elliott," Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography,
ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1885),
1:754.