Autograph Letter Signed from Joshua Leavitt, editor of the American Anti-Slavery Society's newspaper the Emancipator, to Professor Benjamin Silliman, asking whether Edward Hitchcock, President of Amherst College, had assisted him 53 years before.

2pp., 12mo. Good, on lightly-aged paper. The letter begins: 'My Dear Sir | I have an old impression on my memory that Edward Hitchcock, a young man from Deerfield, said to have uncommon attainments in science, assisted you for some weeks in sorting and arranging the Gibbs Cabinet, in the year 1811, but I do not see any reference to that fact in the notices of his life & character published on his lamented decease.' He discusses Hitchcock's 'earliest attainments' before concluding, 'If he had also learned so much of chemistry & mineralogy as to have attracted your attention, it is a circumstance worthy of being verified and publicly noted.'