124 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. VI 



this point all things began to brighten. His health 

 had been restored by a trip to the Pyrenees with his 

 brother George in September. He had got work 

 that enabled him to regard the Admiralty and its 

 menaces with complete equanimity; a Manual of 

 Comparative Anatomy, for Churchill the publisher, 

 regular work on the Westminster^- and another book 

 in prospect, " so that if I quit the Service to-morrow, 

 these will give me more than my pay has been." 

 And on December 7 he writes how he has been re- 

 stored and revived by reading over her last two 

 letters, and confesses, "I have been unjust to the 

 depth and strength of your devotion, but will never 

 be so again." Then he tells all he had gone through 

 before leaving England in September for his holiday 

 how he had resolved to abandon all his special 

 pursuits and take up Chemistry, for practical purposes, 

 when first one publisher and then another asked him 

 to write for them, and hopes were held out to him 

 of being appointed to deliver the Fullerian lectures 

 at the Royal Institution for the next three years ; 

 while, most important of all, Edward Forbes was 

 likely, before long, to leave his post at the Museum 

 of Practical Geology, and he had already been spoken 



1 This regular work was the article on Contemporary Science, 

 which in October 1854 he got Tyndall to share with him. For, 

 he writes, " To give some account of the books in one's own de- 

 partment is no particular trouble, and comes with me under the 

 head of being paid for what I must, in any case, do but I neither 

 will, nor can, go on writing about books in other departments, of 

 which I am not competent to form a judgment even if I had the 

 time to give to them." 



