My Dear Parker – I have been so terribly pressed by my work that I have only just been able to finish the reading of your paper.
Very few pieces of work which have fallen in my way come near your account of the Struthious skull in point of clearness and completeness. It is a most admirable essay, and will make an epoch in this kind of inquiry.
I want you, however, to remodel the introduction, and to make some unessential but convenient difference in the arrangement of some of the figures.
Secondly, full as the appendix is of most valuable and interesting matter, I advise you for the present to keep it back.
My reason is that you have done justice neither to yourself nor to your topics, and that if the appendix is printed as it stands, your labour will be in great measure lost.
You start subjects enough for half a dozen papers, and partly from the compression thus resulting, and partly from the absence of illustrations, I do not believe there are half a dozen men in Europe who will be able to follow you.
Furthermore, though the appendix is relevant enough – every line of it – to those who have dived deep, as you and I have – to any one else it has all the aspects of a string of desultory discussions. As you father confessor, I forbid the publication of the appendix. After having had all this trouble with you I am not going to have you waste your powers for want of a little method, so I tell you.
What you are to do is this. You are to rewrite the introduction and to say that the present paper is the first of a series on the structure of the vertebrate skull... and then if you have stood good-temperedly the amount of badgering and bullying you will get from me whenever you come dutifully to report progress, you shall be left to your own devices in the third year to publish a paper on “The general structure and theory of the vertebrate skull.”
You have a brilliant field before you, and start such that no one is likely to catch you. Sit deliberately down over against the city, conquer it and make it your own, and don’t be wasting powder in knocking down old bastions with random shells.
I write jestingly, but I really am very much in earnest. Come and have a talk on the matter as soon as you can, for I should send in my report. You will find me in Jermyn Street, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday mornings, Thursday afternoon, but not Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. Send a line to say when you will come. – Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley
Letter to William Kitchen Parker (1823-1890) from Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). From The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley by his son Leonard Huxley. 2 vols. London, Macmillan, 1900.
