Boas to Mead - Jan. 25, 1926:

My dear Margaret,

I was glad to receive your lines of December 13, while reached me this morning.

We worried quite a little after we read in the papers about the hurricane and it was a great relief to get your cable. According to what we heard from the Naval Department the report in the papers was considerably exaggerated, but we are of course anxious to hear from you. I only hope that there was no difficulty about provisions and that your house escaped injury.

I presume the heat will be letting up soon and that you may feel better. It is, of course very tiring to work hard in a moist tropical climate.

I was very much interested in your last letter [Dec. 13] which looked to me very promising and I look forward to receiving your report to the Research Council. I hope I did the right thing in regard to your letter in which you asked for reappointment, as I thought before I wrote, in the sense as though you were going to ask for the appointment although I assumed you wrote your letter to me before you had heard of your appointment in the American Museum of Natural History.

I presume Ruth Benedict keeps you informed in regard to events here in New York. Elsie came back here about two weeks ago and she sailed again yesterday. She intends to visit her daughter at the Riviera and then she proposes to go to Egypt and Chartum. She expects to be here early in May.

There is no great change in the composition of our little group here. Thelma Adamson is going to help me with Linguistic work beginning the first of February and I have engaged Miss Sawtell, who studied in Harvard and Paris, to come here to do some anthropolometrical work. Our friend Ansah is going to leave. I am sorry I had no more time for him because he has very interesting information to give. He wrote quite a pile of text for me which I am going to send to Professor Westermann in Berlin to be worked up. Ruth Bunzell is still working at the art and her Kachinas. Herskovits has applied for renewal of his fellowship; he wants to go to Europe to study African collections in the museums. We do not know yet whether Gladys is going to get her Guckenheimer fellowship. There is one new man here whom you do not know, Mr. Herzog, who comes from Hungary and who wants to work in Indian languages. I think you must have heard before about Dr. Olbrechts, who is a graduate of a Belgium University and who came here to study fork-lore. He is now interested in the medicinal formulas of the Cherokee and I hope it may be possible to send him down there before he goes back to Europe. Miss Beckwith is going to try to make a collection of folk tales among the Dakotas, which I think she is quite able to do.

I am still at work on my lectures of last summer but I hope I may get through in a month or so. I am held up particularly by the making of illustrations.

I hope that you are feeling well and that you are considerate of your health. Don’t work harder than you can stand.

With kindest regards I am,

Yours very sincerely,

Franz Boas