Later von 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.