1846 LEAVES ENGLAND 43 



necessities of existence of this he often spoke. As 

 he puts it in his Autobiography : 



Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days was a 

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

 exceptionally rough, as we were often many months with- 

 out receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but 

 ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being 

 about the last 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 acquaintance with a variety of interesting 

 savage and semi -civilised people. But, apart from ex- 

 perience 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 dis- 

 cipline ; to be down on the realities of existence by living 

 on bare necessaries : to find 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 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 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 A Buffon, which stood on my shelf 

 in the chart-room. 



On the whole, life among the company of officers 

 was satisfactory enough. 1 Huxley's immediate 



1 The Assistant -Surgeon messed in the gun-room with the 

 middies. A man in the midst of a lot of .boys, with hardly auy 

 grown-up companions, often has a rather unenviable position ; but 



