i6 Thomas Henry Huxley 



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 d. Buffon which 

 stood on my shelf in the chart-room." 



Huxley was only the surgeon on board the Rattle- 

 snake, and his pursuit of natural history was his own 

 affair. There was a special naturalist appointed to the 

 expedition, no doubt chosen because four years earlier, 

 as assistant to Professor Jukes, he had been attached 

 as naturalist to the expedition of the Fly in the same 

 waters. His name was John MacGillivray, and he was 

 the son of an exceedingly able naturalist whose reputa- 

 tion has been overshadowed by the greater names of 

 the middle century. William MacGillivray, the father, 

 sometime professor at the University of Aberdeen, was 

 one of those driven by an almost instinctive desire to 

 the study of nature. In his youth, when he was a poor 

 lad, desiring to see as much as possible of his native 

 land, and above all to visit the great museums and 

 libraries of the south, he walked from Aberdeen to 

 London with no luggage but a copy of Smith's Flora 

 Britannica. He was an ardent botanist, a collector of 

 insects and molluscs, and one of the pioneers in the 

 anatomy of birds. There are many curious allusions 

 in his writings which seem to shew that he too was be- 

 ginning to doubt the fixity of species, and to guess at 

 the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest 

 which the great Darwin was the first to make a part of 

 the knowledge of the world. It must be confessed that 

 his son John, the companion of Huxley, had little of 

 his father's ability. He was three years older than 

 Huxley, and broke off his medical course at the Uni- 

 versity of PMinburgh to sail in the Fly. After the re- 

 turn of the Rattlesnake, he was appointed in 1852 as 



