12 Selections from Huxley 



without receiving letters or seeing any civilized people 

 but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being 

 about the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be 

 possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire- 

 5 arms as we did on the south coast of New Guinea and 

 of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting savage 

 and semi-civilized people. But, apart from experience of 

 this kind and the opportunities offered for scientific work, 

 to me, personally, the cruise was extremely valuable. It 



10 was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be 

 down on the realities of existence by living on bare neces- 

 saries; to find out how extremely well worth living life 

 seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on 

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



15 weevily biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast ; and, more 

 especially, to learn to work for the sake of what I got for 

 myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I 

 along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows 

 as sailors ought to be and generally are, but, naturally, 



20 they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, 

 nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of 

 the objects which my friends, the middies, christened 

 " Buffons," after the title conspicuous on a -volume of the 

 Suites a Buffon, which stood on my shelf in the chart- 



25 room. 



During the four years of our absence, I sent home 

 communication after communication to the " Linnean 

 Society," with the same result as that obtained by Noah 

 when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired at last of 



30 hearing nothing about them, I determined to do or die, and 

 in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate paper and forwarded 

 it to the Royal Society. This was my dove, if I had only 

 known it. But owing to the movements of the ship, I 

 heard nothing of that either until my return to England 



