A STUDENT'S REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY. 



35 



post upon the "Rattlesnake." This brought with it, as to 

 Darwin, the training of a four-years' voyage to the South Seas 

 off eastern Australia and west Guinea — a more liberal educa- 

 tion to a naturalist than any university affords, even at the 

 present day. This voyage began at twenty-one, and he says of 

 it : " But, apart from experience of this kind and the oppor- 

 tunity offered for scientific work to me, personally, the cruise 

 was extremely valuable. It was good for me to live under 

 sharp discipline, to be down on the realities of existence by 

 living on bare necessities, to find out how extremely worth 

 living life seemed to be, when one woke from a night's rest on 

 a soft plank, with the sky for a canopy, and cocoa and weevily 

 biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast, and more especially to 

 learn to work for what I got for myself out of it. My brother 

 officers were as good as sailors ought to be and generally are ; 

 but, naturally, they neither knew nor cared anything about my 

 pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in the 

 pursuit of the objects which my friends, the middies, christened 

 'Buffons,' after the title conspicuous on a volume of the Suites 

 a Bitffon, which stood in a prominent place on my shelf in the 

 chart-room." 



As a result of this voyage of four years, numerous papers 

 were sent home to the Linnaean Society, of London, but few 

 were published. Upon his return, his first work, Upon the 

 Anatomy and Affinities of the Medusce, was declined for publica- 

 tion by the Admiralty — a fortunate circumstance, for it led to 

 his quitting the navy for good and trusting to his own re- 

 sources. Upon publication (1849) this memoir at once estab- 

 lished his scientific reputation at the early age of twenty-four, 

 just as Richard Owen had won his spurs by his Memoir on 

 the Pearly Nantiliis. In 1852 Huxley's preference as a biolo- 

 gist was to turn back to physiology, which had become his 

 favorite study in the medical course. But his fate was to enter 

 and become distinguished in a widely different branch, which had 

 as little attraction for him as for most students of marine life, 

 namely, palaeontology. He says of this sudden change of base : 

 "At last, in 1854, on the translation of my warm friend 

 Edward Forbes to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the 



