Ship Rations 15 



United States, were fitted with ev^ery convenience for 

 the staff of naturalists, and the luxuries and comforts 

 of civilisation attended them round the world. The 

 late Professor Mosely, for instance, who was a naturalist 

 on the English Challenger expedition, told the pre- 

 sent writer of a pleasant way in which a peculiarity of 

 the deep sea was made to pay toll to the comfort of 

 those on board ship. The great ocean depths all over 

 the world, under the burning skies of the tropics, or 

 below the arctic ice-fields, are extremely cold, the 

 water at the bottom always being only a few degrees 

 above freezing-point. When the dredge brought up a 

 sample of the abysmal mud at a convenient time, it was 

 used to ice the wine for the officers' mess. There was, 

 however, no cooled champagne for Huxley. 



" Life ou board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes, 

 " was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was 

 exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without 

 receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves. In 

 exchange, we had the interest of being about the latest voyagers, 

 I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with people who 

 knew nothing of fire-arms — as we did on the south coast of New 

 Guinea — and of making acquaintances with a variety of interest- 

 ing savage and semi-civilised people. But apart from experi- 

 ence of this kind, and the opportunities 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 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 weevilly 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 myself along with it. My brother officers were as good 

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

 they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor 



