ENGELS TO MARX _ 

Manchester, 20 May 1863 

Moro viejo, Moro viejo, 

EI de la vellida barba.> 
What’s the matter with you, no longer sending word of your 
fortunes and rebus gestis‘? Are you ill or stuck fast in the depths of 

4 See this volume, p. 455.-> Old Moor, Old Moor, / He of the hoary 
beard. - © activities 

'285. Engels to Marx. 20 May 1863 473 

political economy? Or have you appointed little Tussy your 
correspondence secretary? Or How? 

What do you think of the worthies in Berlin who have come to 
the conclusion that it is questionable whether their president is 
permitted to call a minister to order, should the minister say that, 
for all he cared, the whole Chamber could be triple damned, 
etc.”*' Never has a parliament clung more patiently and more 
inopportunely to the thesis that the bourgeois opposition, in its 
struggle with absolutism and the Junker camarilla, is under an 
obligation to let itself be kicked. It’s our old friends of 1848 all 
over again. However, on this occasion times are somewhat 
different. 

Lassalle’s goings-on and the rumpus they have created in 
Germany are really becoming obnoxious.*” It’s high time you 
finished your book; if only to provide us with propagandists of 
a different kind. In other respects, it’s quite a good thing that an 
audience for anti-bourgeois stuff should be recaptured in this way, 
though it’s disastrous that friend Izzy should thereby carve out a 
positon for himself. However, that’s something we have never 
been able to prevent, any more than the heroic swordsman’s 
postures assumed in public by Karl Blind vis-a-vis the Grand Duke 
of Baden.’ 

By the way, if you want to see how much time it takes before 
new scientific discoveries, even in wholly unpolitical fields, make 
any headway, you should read Lyell’s Antiquity of Man. Schmerling 
in Liége had discovered the fossilised human skull from Engis and 
shown it to Lyell as far back as 1834,” when he also brought out 
his thick book.‘ Nevertheless,it was only quite recently that anyone 
thought the thing worthy of serious investigation. Similarly, 
Perthes“ in Abbeville had correctly identified the flint instruments 
in the Somme basin and their geological age as early as 1842, but 
it was not until the end of the fifties that the thing was noticed. 
Such are those scoundrels, the patriarchs of science. 

Lupus has again suffered severe attacks of gout but is better 
now. 

I am also working hard at Serbian and the ballads collected by 
Vuck Stef. Karadzi¢.* It comes more easily to me than any other 
Slavonic language. 

* Frederick I - > In the original: ‘1843’. -¢.P. C. Schmerling, Recherches sur les 
ossemens fossiles découverts dans les cavernes de la province de Liége, V. I-II, Liége, 
1833-1834.-4 Boucher de Crévecoeur de Perthes.-€ [KaradZi¢ V. S.] 
B. Cr. Kapayuh, Hapodne cpnexe njecme. Ku. I-IV. ¥ Aunucyy x y Beuy, 1823-1833.