day, December 15th, 1845.
DEAREST HAL,

Thank you for your nice inkstand, but I do not like your sending it to
me, nevertheless; because I am sure it is a very great privation to you,
being, as you are, particular and fidgety in such matters; and it is not
a great gain to me, who do not care what I write out of, and surely I
shall always be able, go where I will, among frogs or macaronis, to
procure _sucre noir_ or _inchiostro nero_ to indite to you with. I shall
send you back the poor dear little beloved pest you sent me first,
because I am sure the stopper can be readjusted, and then it will be as
_good_ as ever, and you will have a peculiar inkstand to potter with,
without which I do not believe you would be yourself.

Thank you for the extract from Arnold. I have no idea that Adam was "a
mystical allegory," and you know that I believe every man to be his own
devil, and a very sufficient one for all purposes of (so-called)
damnation....

I suppose the history of Genesis to be the form assumed by the earliest
traditions in which men's minds attempted to account for the creation
and the first conditions of the human species. The laborious and
perilous existence of man; the still more grievous liabilities of woman,
who among all barbarous people is indeed the more miserable half of
mankind: and it seems obvious that in those Eastern lands, where these
traditions took their birth, the growth of venomous reptiles, the
deadliest and most insidious of man's natural enemies, should suggest
the idea of the type of all evil.

Moses (to whom the Genesis is, I believe, in spite of some later
disputants, generally attributed), I presume, accepted the account as
literally true, as probably did the authorities, Chaldean or other, from
which he derived it....

Moses' "inspiration" did not prevent his enacting some illiberal and
cruel laws, among many of admirable wisdom and goodness; and I see no
reason why it should have exempted him from a belief in the traditions
of his age....

I have heard that there has lately been found in America part of the
fossil vertebrae of a serpent which must have measured, it is said, _a
hundred and forty feet_! I cannot say I believe it, but if any human
creatures inhabited the earth at the time when such "small gear" are
supposed to have disported themselves on its surface, if the merest
legend containing reference to such a "worm" survived to scare the early
risers on this planet of ours,