Ayez pitie de moi.

T.H.  Huxley.

Jermyn Street, July 2, 1863.

My Dear Darwin,

I am horribly loth to say that I cannot do anything you want done; and partly for that reason and partly because we have been very busy here with some new arrangements during the last day or two, I did not at once reply to your note.

I am afraid, however, I cannot undertake any sort of new work.  In spite of working like a horse (or if you prefer it, like an ass), I find myself scandalously in arrear, and I shall get into terrible hot water if I do not clear off some things that have been hanging about me for months and years.

If you will send me up the specimens, however, I will ask Flower (whom I see constantly) to examine them for you.  The examination will be no great trouble, and I am ashamed to make a fuss about it, but I have sworn a big oath to take no fresh work, great or small, until certain things are done.

I wake up in the morning with somebody saying in my ear, “A is not done, and B is not done, and C is not done, and D is not done,” etc., and a feeling like a fellow whose duns are all in the street waiting for him.  By the way, you ask me what I am doing now, so I will just enumerate some of the A, B, and C’s aforesaid.

   A. Editing lectures on Vertebrate skull and bringing them out in the
      “Medical Times.”

B. Editing and re-writing lectures on Elementary Physiology, just delivered here and reported as I went along. ([Delivered on Friday evenings from April to June at Jermyn Street, and reported in the “Medical Times.”  They formed the basis of his well-known little book on “Elementary Physiology,” published 1866.  He writes on April 22:—­] “Macmillan has just been with me, and I am let in for a school book on physiology based on these lectures of mine.  Money arrangements not quite fixed yet, but he is a good fellow, and will not do me unnecessarily.”)

C. Thinking of my course of twenty-four lectures on the Mammalia at the College of Surgeons in next spring, and making investigations bearing on the same.

D. Thinking of and working at a “Manual of Comparative Anatomy” (may it be d—­d); which I have had in hand these seven years.

E. Getting heaps of remains of new Labyrinthodonts from the Glasgow coalfield, which have to be described.

F. Working at a memoir on Glyptodon based on a new and almost entire specimen at the College of Surgeons.

G. Preparing a new decade upon Fossil fishes for this place.

H. Knowing that I ought to have written long ago a description of a most interesting lot of Indian fossils sent to me by Oldham.

I. Being blown up by Hooker for doing nothing for the “Natural History Review.”

K. Being bothered by sundry editors just to write articles “which you know you can knock off in a moment.”

L. Consciousness of having left unwritten letters which ought to have been written long ago, especially to C. Darwin.