128 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, via 



to the labour of translation — and I could get any amount of 

 scientific work I wanted — so there was a living, though a 

 scanty one, and amazingly hard work for it. My pen is not 

 a very facile one, and what I write costs me a good deal of 

 trouble. 



In the spring of this year, however, a door opened. My 

 poor lost friend Professor Forbes — whose steady attachment and 

 aid had always been of the utmost service to me — was called 

 to fill the chair of Natural History in Edinburgh at a moment's 

 notice. It is a very valuable appointment, and he was obliged 

 to fill it at once. Of course he left a number of vacancies be- 

 hind, among them one at the Government School of Mines in 

 Jermyn Street, where he lectured on Natural History. I was 

 called upon to take up his lectures where he left off, in the same 

 sudden way, and the upshot of it all was that I became perma- 

 nently attached — with £200 a year pay. In other ways I can 

 make a couple of hundred a year more even now, and I hope 

 by-and-by to do better. In fact, a married man, as I hope soon 

 to be, cannot live at all in the position which I ought to occupy 

 under less than six hundred a year. If I keep my health, how- 

 ever, I have every hope of being able to do this — but, as the 

 jockeys say, the pace is severe. Nettie is coming over in the 

 spring, and if I have any luck at all, I mean to have paid off 

 my debts and to be married by this time next year.* 



In the meanwhile, strangely enough — and very painfully for 

 me — new possibilities have sprung up. My poor friend Forbes 

 died only a week ago, just as he was beginning his course and 

 entering upon as brilliant a career as ever was opened to any 

 scientific man in this country. 



I cannot tell you how deeply this has shocked me. I owe him 

 so much, I loved him so well, and I have so very very few 

 friends in the true sense of the word, that it has been perhaps 



* He writes on July 21, 1851 : — " I commenced life upon nothing at 

 all, and I had to borrow in the ordinary way from an agent for the 

 necessary expenses of my outfit. I sent home a great deal of money, 

 but notwithstanding, from the beautiful way they have of accumu- 

 lating interest and charges of one description and another, I found 

 myself £ion in debt when I returned — besides something to my broth- 

 er, about which, however, I do not suppose I need trouble myself just 

 at present. As you may imagine, living in London, my pay now 

 hardly keeps me, to say nothing of paying off my old scores. I could 

 get no account of how things were going on with my agent while I 

 was away, and therefore I never could tell exactly how I stood." 



