74 



LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, v 



Again, on May 4 : — 



I am twenty-six to-day . . . and it reminds me that I have 

 left you now a whole year. It is perfectly frightful to think how 

 the time is slipping by, and yet seems to bring us no nearer. 



What have I done with my twenty-sixth year ? Six months 

 were spent at sea, and therefore may be considered as so much 

 lost; and six months I have had in England. That, I may say, 

 has not been thrown away altogether without fruit. I have read 

 a good deal and I have written a good deal. I have made some 

 valuable friends, and have found my work more highly esti- 

 mated than I had ventured to hope. I must tell you something, 

 because it will please you, even if you think me vain for 

 doing so. 



I was talking to Professor Owen yesterday, and said that I 

 imagined I had to thank him in great measure for the honour of 

 the F.R.S. " No," he said, " you have nothing to thank but the 

 goodness of your own work." For about ten minutes I felt 

 rather proud of that speech, and shall keep it by me whenever 

 I feel inclined to think myself a fool, and that I have a most 

 mistaken notion of my own capacities. The only use of honours 

 is as an antidote to such fits of the " blue devils." Of one thing, 

 however, which is by no means so agreeable, my opportunities 

 for seeing the scientific world in England force upon me every 

 day a stronger and stronger conviction. It is that there is no 

 chance of living by science. I have been loth to believe it, but 

 it is so. There are not more than four or five offices in London 

 which a Zoologist or Comparative Anatomist can hold and live 

 by. Owen, 'who has a European reputation, second only to that 

 of Cuvier, gets as Hunterian Professor £300 a year ! which is 

 less than the salary of many a bank clerk. My friend Forbes, 

 who is a highly distinguished and a very able man, gets the 

 same from his office of Paleontologist to the Geological Survey 

 of Great Britain. Now, these are first-rate men — men who have 

 been at work for years laboriously toiling upward — men whose 

 abilities, had they turned them into the many channels of money- 

 making, must have made large fortunes. But the beauty of 

 Nature and the pursuit of Truth allured them into a nobler life 

 — and this is the result. ... In literature a man may write for 

 magazines and reviews, and so support himself; but not so in 

 science. I could get anything I write into any of the journals 

 or any of the Transactions, but I know no means of thereby 

 earning five shillings. A man who chooses a life of science 



