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