John Murray (Challenger Office) an Ernst Haeckel, Edinburgh, 21. April 1879
Challenger Office
University Edinburgh,
21 April 1879.
My Dear Haeckel.
I should have written to you before this, but I have been very busy. I send you to-day a box containing a number of microscopic specimens of Radiolaria from the Pacific and also some washings from the Pacific which are almost wholly made up of Radiolaria.
By the time you come here || in August I will have a lot more of my surface preparations looked out for you. You will find in the box a few preparations marked thus [rechter Winkel mit Kreuz] and some others thus [rechter Winkel]. In those with the cross there are specimens of the form which you figured in your last note to me as an interesting form of Paradictium. In those without the cross there are speciemns of the Polycistina which I told you about as being an internal shell. [Zeichnung]
I hope you will find a lot || more new forms of Radiolaria in these preparations – I suppose you will take as many of these preparations as I can give you or have you had enough of them?
Thomson says he will expect you to stay with him when you come in August.
Would you care to spend two weeks in a yacht on the west-coast of Scotland when you come, or would you rather go to some place on the coast and go out each day in a boot to look for Medusae &c.? Perhaps || you do not like living on a yacht – hence my question.
It is quite on the cards that I will go to the Indian Ocean in the H. M. S. „Investigator“ which is going to explore in these Seas.
My best remembrances to Mrs Haeckel and to the children. I’m sorry you are not going to bring Mrs Haeckel with you. If you care to bring your son with you some of my friends here will look after him and it may be a nice change for him
Yours very truly
John Murray.