Esteemed Sir,

I am always delighted to know and engage in literary discussions with such a talented and learned man as you, my dearest friend. I received the plan for a periodical that you sent me last summer and also the two first monthly issues. I found your Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind splendid, and I shall study them so as to be able to give you my thoughts about them. The paper on sexual differences in organic nature, in the second issue, is impossible for me to decipher, even though the author seems to be an intelligent fellow. There was once a severely critical discussion in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung about the ideas expressed in the letters of Herr Hube of Thorn concerning a similar relationship extending throughout nature. The ideas were attacked as romantic twaddle. To be sure, we sometimes find something like that running through our heads, without knowing what to make of it. The organization of nature has always struck me as amazing and as a sort of chasm of thought; I mean, the idea that fertilization, in both realms of nature, always needs two sexes in order for the species to be propagated. After all, we don't want to believe that providence has chosen this arrangement, almost playfully, for the sake of variety. On the contrary, we have reason to believe that propagation is not possible in any other way.