Life on board Her Majesty’s ship in those days was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves.  In exchange, we had the interest of being about the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire-arms—­as we did on the south coast of New Guinea—­and of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting savage and semi-civilised people.  But, apart from experience of this kind and the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was extremely valuable.  It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessaries; to find out 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 weevilly 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.  My brother officers were as good fellows as sailors ought to be and generally are, but, naturally, they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends, the middies,[10] christened “Buffons,” after the title conspicuous on a volume of the Suites a Buffon,[11] which stood on my shelf in the chart room.

During the four years of our absence, I sent home communication after communication to the “Linnean Society,"[12] with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark.  Tired at last of hearing nothing about them, I determined to do or die, and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate paper and forwarded it to the Royal Society.[13] This was my dove, if I had only known it.  But owing to the movements of the ship, I heard nothing of that either until my return to England in the latter end of the year 1850, when I found that it was printed and published, and that a huge packet of separate copies awaited me.  When I hear some of my young friends complain of want of sympathy and encouragement, I am inclined to think that my naval life was not the least valuable part of my education.

Three years after my return were occupied by a battle between my scientific friends on the one hand and the Admiralty on the other, as to whether the latter ought, or ought not, to act up to the spirit of a pledge they had given to encourage officers who had done scientific work by contributing to the expense of publishing mine.  At last the Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose, cut short the discussion by ordering me to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and as Rastignac,[14] in the Pere Goriot [15] says to Paris, I said to London “a nous deux.”  I desired to obtain a Professorship of either Physiology or Comparative Anatomy, and as vacancies occurred I