To T. H. Huxley 14 April [1860]1
Down Bromley Kent
Ap. 14th
My dear Huxley
Many thanks for your kind & pleasant letter. I have been much interested by Deep Sea Soundings & will return it by this Post or soon as soon as I have copied a few sentences.—2 I see Dayman thinks the deposit thin & that it was penetrated by the Plunger.3 It ought to have been stated by him whether any of the fragments of rock seemed as if recently broken off.— I think you said that some one was investigating the Soundings. I earnestly hope that you will ask the someone to carefully observe, whether any considerable number of the calcareous organisms are more or less friable, or corroded, or scaling So that one might form some crude notion whether the deposition is so rapid that the foraminifera are preserved from decay & thus are forming strata at this profound depth. This is a subject which seems to me to have been much neglected in examining soundings.—
Bronn has sent me 2 copies of his “Morphologische Studien über die Gestaltungs Gesetze”.4 It looks elementary. If you will write you shall have the copy; if not, I will give it to Linnean Library
Yours Most sincerely | C. Darwin
I quite agree with letter from Lyell that your extinguished Theologians laying about the cradle of each new science &c &c is splendid 5
Footnotes
Bibliography
Origin: On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1859.
Summary
On THH’s "Deep-sea soundings in the North Atlantic" ["Report on the examination of specimens of bottom" in Deep-sea soundings made in H.M.S. "Cyclops", Lieut. Commander J. Dayman (1858)]. Suggests further investigations be made of deposits of calcareous organisms.
THH’s "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science" ["The origin of species", Westminster Rev. 17 (1860): 541–70].
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-2760
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Thomas Henry Huxley
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine Archives (Huxley 5: 115)
- Physical description
- ALS 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 2760,” accessed on 18 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-2760.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 8