Lyon Playfair, for service as a naval surgeon, passed the necessary examination, and went to Haslar. His official chief, old John Richardson, of Arctic fame, silently kept an eye upon him, and, failing to get him one of the coveted resident appointments, kept him, all unaware and ill-content, at Haslar till something worthy of his scientific abilities should turn up. Seven months passed; then came the chance of sailing on the surveying and exploring ship Rattlesnake, under Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., brother of the more famous Dean, who was in want of an assistant-surgeon with a turn for science.

IV

THE VOYAGE OF THE RATTLESNAKE, AND ITS SEQUEL

The three friends, Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley, were alike in this, that each in his turn began his career with a great voyage of scientific discovery in one of H.M. ships. Darwin was twenty-two when the Beagle sailed for the Straits of Magellan; Hooker, also, was twenty-two when he sailed for the Antarctic with Ross on the Erebus; Huxley was but twenty-one when he set forth with Owen Stanley for Australian waters to survey the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea. Each found in the years of distant travel a withdrawal from the distracting bustle of ordinary life, which enabled him to concentrate upon original work and to reflect deeply, unhampered by current doctrines; each came back, not only deeply impressed by the elemental problems of life, but "salted" with the sea and the discipline of the sea.

It was good to live under sharp discipline; 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 weevily 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.

Huxley was not so well situated as either Darwin, the well-to-do amateur who was naturalist to the expedition, or Hooker, the son of a distinguished botanist, receiving many privileges from his father's friend, Captain Ross, while officially he was but an assistant-surgeon and second naturalist. Huxley had neither friends nor influence beyond the simple recommendation of "old John" Richardson. Macgillivray, the naturalist, and the Captain himself had scientific interests, but not so the other officers, who disliked seeing the decks messed by the contents of the tow-net. Yet they were "as good fellows as sailors ought to be, and generally are," though they did not understand why he should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which his friends the middies christened "Buffons," after his volume of the Suites à Buffon. As assistant-surgeon he messed with the middies, but his good spirits and fun and freedom from any assumption of superiority made the boys his good comrades.

From the first he was very busy, glorying in the prospect of being able to give himself up to his favourite pursuits, without thereby neglecting the proper duties of life. A twenty-eight gun frigate was anything but a floating palace. The Rattlesnake was badly fitted out, and always leaky; the lower deck gave a head-space of four feet ten, which was cramping to a man of five feet eleven; but he had the run of the commodious chart-room, as arranged for a surveying ship, and would have had the run of the library if Captain Stanley's requisition for books had not been "overlooked" by a parsimonious Admiralty. His tiny cabin was light enough to work in on a dull day; but as for the possibility of making a scientific collection, it was but seven feet by six, by five feet six inches high, and infested with cockroaches to boot.

His work took shape in a mass of drawings and descriptions from the dissection of the perishable marine organisms of the tropical seas, and, yet more important, in the new classification he established upon anatomical grounds. His first papers were sent to the Linnean Society by Captain Stanley; the later and more important he sent himself to Edward Forbes, the most interested and helpful of the biologists to whom he had been introduced before he left England. To his angry disappointment, no news of them, no acknowledgment even, reached him on the other side of the world; it was not till he returned, after the four years of his voyage, that he found they had been published by the Royal Society, and had established his reputation as a first-rate investigator. But, though with much difficulty the scientific authorities enabled him to secure the promised Government grant for his book, and a temporary billet ashore while he worked at it, he was only able to publish his Oceanic Hydrozoa; a vast quantity of his researches remained unpublished, and subsequent investigators, going over the same ground, won the credit for them.

The other scientific interest strongly aroused on the voyage was anthropology. The cruise of the Rattlesnake provided one of the last opportunities of visiting tribes who had never before seen a white man. The young surgeon made a point of getting into touch with these primitive people at Cape York, and in the islands off New Guinea. He made a preliminary exploration through the uncharted bush of Queensland with the ill-fated Kennedy, and all but accompanied him on his disastrous journey to Cape York, when of all the party only two were rescued, through the devotion of the faithful native guide. He exchanged names, and therefore affinities, with a friendly native of the Louisiades, and learned much at first hand as to their physical and mental characteristics, which stimulated his subsequent anthropological work.

The Australian voyage, then, provided a magnificent field for original research and original thought: the unknown naval surgeon returned from it to find himself recognized as one of the coming men. Contact with the larger world had broadened his outlook; the touch of naval discipline concentrated his powers. But Australia gave him another gift. He met at Sydney his future wife. The young couple fell in love almost at first sight, and became engaged. They were of the same age, 22; they hoped to get married when he was promoted to the rank of full surgeon; they were destined to wait seven-and-a-half years before she returned home to fulfil his early jesting prophecy of making her a Frau Professorin. Here, again, was stern disciplining on the part of destiny. For the first years they were able to meet during the intervals between the long surveying cruises of the ship; they cheated the months of separation by keeping journals for each other. But for nearly five years they were parted by twelve thousand miles of sea, and, worse, by slow sailing ships, when letters would take five months or more to receive an answer, which by that time might be entirely at cross purposes with the changed aspect of affairs. The possibilities of estrangement were incalculable. Their lives were developing on entirely different lines. He had been admitted to the inmost circle of men of science as an intellectual peer; he was elected F.R.S. when he was barely twenty-six, and received the Royal Medal the following year, as well as being chosen to serve on the Council of the Society; he wrote; he lectured at the Royal Institution. And yet, with all the support of the leaders in science, he could not find any post wherein to earn his bread and butter. He stood for professorships at Toronto, at Sydney, at Aberdeen, Cork and King's College, London. The Admiralty, in March, 1854, even refused further leave for the publication of the scientific work to do which he had been sent out. He took the bull by the horns, and, rather than return to the hopeless routine of a naval surgeon, let the Admiralty fulfil their