By and by I will gladly go with you over your vast material.
Did you not some time ago tell me that you considered the Y-shaped bone (so-called presphenoid) in the Pike to be the true basisphenoid? If so, let me know before lecture to-morrow, that I may not commit theft unawares.
I have arrived at that conclusion myself from the anatomical relations of the bone in question to the brain and nerves.
I look upon the proposition opisthotis = turtle's "occipital externe" = Perch's Rocher (Cuvier) as the one thing needful to clear up the unity of structure of the bony cranium; and it shall be counted unto me as a great sin if I have helped to keep you back from it. The thing has been dawning upon me ever since I read Kolliker's book two summers ago, but I have never had time to work it out.
Ever yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[The following extracts from a letter to Hooker and a letter to Darwin describe the pressure of his work at this time.]
1863.
My dear Hooker,
…I would willingly send a paper to the Linnean this year if I could, but I do not see how it is practicable. I lecture five times a week from now till the middle of February. I then have to give eighteen lectures at the College of Surgeons—six on classification, and twelve on the vertebrate skeleton. I might write a paper on this new Glyptodon, with some eighteen to twenty plates. A preliminary notice has already gone to the Royal Society. I have a decade of fossil fish in progress; a fellow in the country WILL keep on sending me splendid new Labyrinthodonts from the coal, and that d—d manual must come out.