London, 22 November 1882 

Dear Moor, 

You will have received my letter of yesterday’s date, with cheque 
for £30. 

Hartmann? was here on Sunday evening in a state of intense inven- 
tor’s euphoria. His cell has been in action since Friday, operating 
a galvanometer with high resistance which at first registered more than 
50° and is now steady at 46°. It would, he said, continue to run smooth- 
ly without further attention not just for three, but actually for six 
months or even a year. However, he had no intention of showing it to 
buyers because of as yet unpatented improvements. So my intervention 
was again required. I| firmly refused and arranged for the matter — 
a perfectly simple one that presents no real difficulty — to be settled by 
Percy (which it has), advising him [Hartmann] in future to supply his 

* Lev Hartmann-? Rosher 

English buyers with the article he had sold them and not something 
else, either better or worse. Whether it will do any good is another 
question. The chap’s a fanatical worker; work and fanaticism are 
wearing him out; the only sleep he gets is between 3 and 5 in the morn- 
ing, and he looks ghastly but is correspondingly wel! turned out and 
every time he comes here he is wearing a different suit. One of his new 
patent improvements is as follows: To protect the cell’s caustic 
potash, KOH, against the carbonic acid in the air, and to prevent it 
turning into potassium carbonate, he poured oz! onto the solution 
and, according to Percy, simply couldn’t understand why this failed 
to do the trick, the combination of fat and alkali forming instead 
something that looked like soap and, indeed, was soap! 

_ [have recently obtained seconp Hann what I have long been looking 
for--a complete bound edition of Geschichtschreiber der deutschen 
Vorzeit, and guess from the sale of whose library it had come? — 
Dr Strousberg’s! 1 found therein a passage in Plutarch’s Marius which, 
seen in conjunction with Caesar and Tacitus,* explains the entire 
agrarian structure. 

The Cimbri ‘had migrated, but not, as it were, all at one go, or in a regular stream; 
rather, they had always pushed on, year after year, during the good season and in this 
way had, over a long period, fought and battled their way across the Continent’. 

This passage, seen in conjunction with the Suebi’s annual move to 
new lands, as described 70 years later by Caesar; reveals the manner 
in which the Germanic migrations took place. Where they spent the 
winter, there they would sow in the spring and, having reaped, would 
move on until winter brought them to a halt again. That they regular- 
ly tilled the land in summer (if they did not engage in rapine insteed) 
can be assumed with some certainty in the case of peoples who 
had brought agriculture with them from Asia. In the case of the Cim- 
bri, the process of migration is still in evidence; in Caesar it comes to 
an end, the Rhine forming an impassable frontier. Together, these 
two manifestations explain why, in Caesar, ‘privati ac separati agri apud 
eos nihil est)“: migration means that collective cultivation was only 
possible by kinship community, and to pace out individual fields 

* Caesar, Commentarii de bello Gallico and Tacitus, Germania, both in the above- 
mentioned edition.-" Quated from Plutarch’s Life of Marius according to Die Geschicht- 
schreiber der deutschen Vorzeit..., Vol. 1, ‘Die Urzeit’, p.61.-* ‘amongst them there are no 
private or separate fields 

would have been absurd. In Tacitus, the step forward — or, perhaps, 
back — to individual cultivation within the framework of common 
ownership has been made. 

Tussy has sent me by hand various newspapers for onward 
transmission to you; with them, I enclose an Egalite. The Egalité’s 
impertinence would really seem to have made an impression on the 
Parquet*; the addresses are still written in Lafargue’s hand. 

Kindest regards. 

Your 
FE.