AUTOBIOGRAPHY 15 



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, 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 accepted the latter only provisionally, 

 telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, 

 and that I should give up Natural 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 my mouth. I believe I had every 

 fault a speaker could have (except talking at ran- 

 dom 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, malgrt 

 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 oratorical experiments. 



The last thing that it would be proper for me 



