12 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and as 

 Rastignac, in the Pere Goriot says to Paris, I said to 

 London " a nous deux." I desired to obtain a Professor- 

 ship of either Physiology or Comparative Anatomy, and 

 as vacancies occurred I applied, but in vain. My friend, 

 Professor Tyndall, and I were candidates at the same 

 time, he for the Chair of Physics and I for that of 

 Natural History in the University of Toronto, which, 

 fortunately, as it turned out, would not look at either 

 of us. I say fortunately, not from any lack of respect 

 for Toronto, but because I soon made up my mind 

 that London was the place for me, and hence I have 

 steadily declined the inducements to leave it, which 

 have at various times been offered. At last, in 1854, 

 on the translation of my warm friend Edward Forbes, 

 to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director- 

 General of the Geological Survey, offered me the post 

 Forbes vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on Nat- 

 ural History. I refused the former point blank, and 

 accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry 

 that I did not care for fossils, and that I should give 

 up Natural History as soon as I could get a physio- 

 logical post. But I held the office for thirty-one years, 

 and a large part of my work has been paleontological. 

 At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a 

 firm conviction that I should break down even 7 time 

 I opened my mouth. I believe I had every fault^a 

 speaker could have (except talking at random or in- 

 dulging in rhetoric), when I spoke to the first import- 

 ant audience I ever addressed, on a Friday evening 

 at the Royal Institution, in 1852. Yet, I must confess 

 to having been guilty, malgre moi, of as much public 

 speaking as most of my contemporaries, and for the 

 last ten years -it ceased to be so much of a bugbear to 



