My dear Huxley

I must & will answer you, for it is a real pleasure to me to thank you cordially for your note.² Such notes, as this of yours & a few others are the real medal to me & not the round bit of gold.³ These have given me a pleasure which will long endure; so believe in my cordial thanks for your note.

I want to make a suggestion to you, but which may probably have occurred to you. Emma⁴ was reading your Lecture⁵ to Horace⁶ & ended by saying “I wish he would write a book”   I answered he has just written a great Book on the Skull.⁷ “I dont call that a Book” she replied & added “I want something that people can read; he does write so well”. Now with your ease in writing & with knowledge at your fingers’ ends, do you not think you could write a “Popular Treatise on Zoology”.⁸ Of course it would be some waste of time; but I have been asked more than a dozen times to recommend something for a beginner, & could only think of Carpenter’s Zoology.⁹ I am sure that a striking Treatise would do real service to Science by educating naturalists. If you were to keep a portfolio open for a couple of years, & throw in slips of paper, as subjects crossed your mind; you would soon have a skeleton (& that seems to me the difficulty) on which to put the flesh & colours in your inimitable manner.

I believe such a Book might have a brilliant success: but I did not intend to scribble so much about it.—

Give my kindest remembrances to M^rs Huxley & cordial thanks for her sympathy.¹⁰ Tell her I was looking at “Enoch Arden” & as I know how she admires Tennyson I must call her attention to two sweetly pretty lines (p. 105) .... : “and he meant, he said he meant, Perhaps he meant, or partly meant, you well”.¹¹ Such a gem as this is enough to make me young again & like poetry with pristine fervour.—

My dear Huxley | Yours affec^y | Ch. Darwin

Can you give me a Photographic Carte of yourself— I have set up a Book for my Scientific friends,¹² | C. D.