AUTOBIOGRAPHY II 



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, 5 

 the Director- General of the Geological Survey, offered me 

 the post Forbes vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on 

 Natural History. I refused the former point blank, and ac- 

 cepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I 

 did not care for fossils, and that I should give up Natural 10 

 History as soon as I could get a physiological 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 every time I opened 15 

 my mouth. I believe I had every fault a speaker could have 

 (except talking at random or indulging in rhetoric), when I 

 spoke to the first important 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 20 

 public speaking as most of my contemporaries, and for the 

 last ten years it ceased to be so much of a bugbear to me. I 

 used to pity myself for having to go through this training, 

 but I am now more disposed to compassionate the unfortu- 

 nate audiences, especially my ever friendly hearers at the 25 

 Royal Institution, who were the subjects of my oratorical 

 experiments. 



The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be 

 to speak of the work of my life, or to say at the end of the 

 day whether I think I have earned my wages or not. Men are 30 

 said to be partial judges of themselves young men may be, 

 I doubt if old men are. Life seems terribly foreshortened as 

 they look back and the mountain they set themselves to climb 

 in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably higher 



