1S56 LECTURER ON NATURAL HISTORY 143 



on Natural History of course demanded a good deal of 

 first-hand investigation, and not only occasional notes in his 

 fragmentary journals, but a vast mass of drawings now pre- 

 served at South Kensington attest the amount of work he 

 still managed to give to these subjects. But with the ex- 

 ception of the Hunterian Lectures of 1868, he only pub- 

 lished one paper on Invertebrates as late as i860; and only 

 half a dozen, not counting the belated " Oceanic Hydro- 

 zoa," between 1856 and 1859. The essay on the Crayfish 

 did not appear until after he had left Jermyn Street and 

 Paleontology for South Kensington. 



The " Method of Paleontology," published in 1856, was 

 the first of a long series of papers dealing with fossil crea- 

 tures, the description of which fell to him as Naturalist to 

 the Geological Survey. By i860 he had published twelve 

 such papers, and by 1871 twenty-six more, or thirty-eight 

 in sixteen years. 



It was a curious irony of fate that led him into this 

 position. He writes in his Autobiography that, when Sir 

 Henry de la Beche, the Director-General of the Geological 

 Survey, offered him the post Forbes vacated of Paleontolo- 

 gist 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. 



Yet the diversion was not without great use. A wide 

 knowledge of paleontology offered a key to many problems 

 that were hotly debated in the years of battle following the 

 publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, as well as pro- 

 viding fresh subject-matter for the lectures in which he con- 

 tinued to give the lay world the results of his thought. 



On the administrative and olificial side he laid before 

 himself the organisation of the resources of the Museum of 

 Practical Geology as an educational instrument. Tffis in- 

 volved several years' work in the arrangement of the speci- 

 mens, so as to illustrate the paleontological lectures, and the 



