Humboldt wrote to Mr. Gallatin of the
interest felt abroad, and by himself, in the gold of the mountains of
Virginia and Tennessee, a country which rivaled on a small scale the
Dorado of Siberia. The treasures of the Pacific coast were not yet
dreamed of.

Mr. Gallatin perfectly understood the range of his own powers. He said
of himself:--

"If I have met with any success, either in public bodies, as an
executive officer, or in foreign negotiations, it has been
exclusively through a patient and most thorough investigation of
all the attainable facts, and a cautious application of these to
the questions under discussion.... Long habit has given me great
facility in collating, digesting, and extracting complex documents,
but I am not hasty in drawing inferences; the arrangement of the
facts and arguments is always to me a considerable labor, and
though aiming at nothing more than perspicuity and brevity, I am a
very slow writer."

Mr. Gallatin's manuscripts and drafts show long and minute labor in
their well considered and abundant alterations. Referring on one
occasion to his habit of reasoning, Mr. Gallatin remarked, that of all
processes that of analogy is the most dangerous, yet that which he
habitually used; that it required the greatest possible number of facts.
This is the foundation of philology, and his understanding of its method
and its dangers is the reason of his success in this branch of science.

The difficulty experienced in establishing any literary or scientific
institutions in New York was very great. An effort made in 1830, which
Mr. Gallatin favored, to establish a literary periodical failed, not on
account of the pecuniary difficulties, but from the impossibility of
uniting a sufficient number of able cooeperators. But Mr. Gallatin's
interest in literature was not as great as in science.[26]

In 1841 a national institution for the promotion of science was
organized at Washington. The cooeperation of Mr. Gallatin was invited,
but the society had a short existence. In 1843 Mr. Gallatin was chosen
president of the New York Historical Society. His inaugural address is
an epitome of political wisdom. Pronounced at any crisis of our history,
it would have become a text for the student. In this sketch he analyzed
the causes which contributed to form our national character and to
establish a government founded on justice and on equal rights. He showed