Dear Jenyns

I am much obliged for your note & kind intended present of your volume, which I value much.—² As the Athenæum Club is near Yarrell’s,³ perhaps you could send it there, (but do not, if it happens to be inconvenient) for I invariably call there when in town, & occasionally send for parcels when they have accumulated. I feel sure I shall like it, for all discussions & observations on what the world would call trifling points in Natural History, always, appear to me very interesting.⁴ In such foreign periodicals, as I have seen, there are no such papers, as White, or Waterton;⁵ or some few other naturalists in Loudon’s & Charlesworth’s Journal,⁶ would have written, & a great loss it has always appeared to me.—

I sh^d. have much liked to have met you in London, but I cannot leave home, as my wife is recovering from a rather sharp fever attack & I am myself slaving to finish my S. American Geology, of which, thanks to all Plutonic powers, two-thirds are through the press, & then I shall feel a comparatively free man.

Have you any thoughts of Southampton? I have some vague idea of going there, & sh^d. much enjoy meeting you.—⁷

My health continues pretty well; never right & seldom very wrong, as long as I live quite quietly.

The little d’^s, of whom you enquire, now number four, two of each gender.⁸

Believe me, dear Jenyns with very many thanks for your kind present | Ever yours truly | C. Darwin