14 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



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, nialgre 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 me. 

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

 but I am now more disposed to compassionate the un- 

 fortunate audiences, especially my ever-friendly hearers at 

 the Royal Institution, who were the subjects of my orator- 

 ical 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 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 ranges when, with failing breath, 

 they reach the top. But if I may speak of the objects I 

 have had more or less definitely in view since I began the 

 ascent of my hillock, they are briefly these: To promote 

 the increase of natural knowledge and to forward the 

 application of scientific methods of investigation to all the 

 problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction 

 which has grown with my growth and strengthened with 

 my strength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings 

 of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and 

 the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment 

 of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier 

 features is stripped off. 



It is with this intent that I have subordinated any reason- 

 able, or unreasonable, ambition for scientific fame which 



