Rescue of a White Woman 27 



friends to bring her across to the mainland within a short dis- 

 tance of where the vessels lay. The blacks were credulous 

 enough to believe that as she had been so long with them and 

 had been so well treated, she did not intend to leave them, — 

 only ' she felt a strong desire to see the white people once more 

 and shake hands with them ' : adding that she would be certain 

 to purchase some axes, knives, tobacco, and other much-prized 

 articles." 



Although the external adventures of the Rattlesnake 

 party were less varied and exciting than might have 

 been expected in a voyage of four years in the tropic 

 seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental adventures 

 through which Huxley passed in the time must have 

 been of the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' 

 course in the great university of nature, and when he 

 had finished it he was no longer a mere student, capri- 

 cious and unsettled in his mental tastes and inclinations, 

 but had set his face steadily towards his future life- 

 work. It is interesting to compare the importance in 

 Huxley's life of the Rattlesnake voyage with the im- 

 portance in Darwin's life of the voyage on the Beagle 

 undertaken some fifteen j^ears earlier. Huxley, when 

 he started, was a young surgeon with a taste of a vagtie 

 kind for dissecting and for drawing the peculiarities of 

 structure of different animals revealed by the knife and 

 the microscope. Day after day, month after month, 

 year after year, in the abundant leisure his slight pro- 

 fessional duties left him, he dissected and drew, dis- 

 sected and drew, animal after animal, as he got them 

 from the dredge or tow-net, or from the surface of the 

 coral reefs. He was not in any sense of the word a- 

 collecting naturalist. The identification and naming] 

 of species interested him little. What he cared for was, 

 he tells tis, " the architectural and engineering part of ' 

 the business : the working out of the wonderful unity 



