I must give you sincere thanks for the details of small news contained in your letter.  You know how previous that kind of information is to a person absent from his country, and how difficult it is to be procured.  I hope to receive soon permission to visit America this summer, and to possess myself anew, by conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and their ideas.  I know only the Americans of the year 1784.  They tell me this is to be much a stranger to those of 1789.  This renewal of acquaintance is no indifferent matter to one, acting at such a distance, as that instructions cannot be received hot and hot.  One of my pleasures, too, will be that of talking over the old and new with you.

In the mean time, and at all times, I have the honor to be, with great and sincere esteem.  Dear Sir, your friend and servant,

Th:  Jefferson,

LETTER CXCIV.—­TO DOCTOR WILLARD, March 24, 1789

TO DOCTOR WILLARD.

Paris, March 24, 1789.

Sir,

I have been lately honored with your letter of September the 24th, 1788, accompanied by a diploma for a Doctorate of Laws, which the University of Harvard has been pleased to confer on me.  Conscious how little I merit it, I am the more sensible of their goodness and indulgence to a stranger, who has had no means ef serving or making himself known to them.  I beg you to return them my grateful thanks, and to assure them that this notice from so eminent a seat of science is very precious to me.

The most remarkable publications we have had in France, for a year or two past, are the following. Les Voyages d’Anacharsis, par Abbe Barthelemi, seven volumes, octavo.  This is a very elegant digest of whatever is known of the Greeks; useless, indeed, to him who has read the original authors, but very proper for one who reads modern languages only.  The works of the King of Prussia.  The Berlin edition is in sixteen volumes, octavo.  It is said to have been gutted at Berlin; and here it has been still more mangled.  There are one or two other editions published abroad, which pretend to have rectified the maltreatment both of Berlin and Paris.  Some time will be necessary to settle the public mind as to the best edition.

Montignot has given us the original Greek, and a French translation of the seventh book of Ptolemy’s great work, under the title of Etat des Etoiles fixes au second siecle, in quarto.  He has given the designation of the same stars by Flamsteed and Bayer, and their position in the year 1786.  A very remarkable work is the Mechanique Analytique of La Grange, in quarto.  He is allowed to be the greatest mathematician now living, and his personal worth is equal to his science.  The object of his work is to reduce all the principles of mechanics to the single one of the equilibrium, and to give a simple formula applicable to them all.  The