CHAPTER IV

EARLY DAYS IN LONDON

     Scientific Work as Unattached Ship-Surgeon—­Introduction to
     London Scientific Society—­Translating, Reviewing, and
     Lecturing—­Ascidians—­Molluscs and the Archetype—­Criticism of
     Pre-Darwinian Evolution—­Appointment to Geological Survey.

The Rattlesnake was paid off at Chatham on November 9, 1850.  In the natural course of events Huxley would have been appointed before long to active service upon another ship.  But he had no intention of relapsing into the position of a mere navy doctor; he had accumulated sufficient scientific material to keep him employed on scientific investigation for years, and so he applied to the Admiralty to “be borne on the books” of H.M.S. Fisgard at Woolwich,—­that is to say, to be appointed assistant-surgeon to the ship “for particular service,” so that he should not be compelled to live on board, but might remain in town, and, with free access to libraries and museums, work up the observations he had made on the Rattlesnake into serious and substantial contributions to science.  His request was granted, largely by the aid of his old chief, Sir W. Burnett, who continued to take the most useful interest in the young man he had originally nominated to the service.  In a letter to him Huxley described the investigations which he desired to continue as being chiefly those on “the anatomy of certain Gasteropod and Pteropod Mollusca, of Firola and Atlantis, of Salpa and Pyrosoma, of two new Ascidians, namely, Appendicularia and Doliolum, of Sagitta and certain Annelids, of the auditory and circulatory organs of certain transparent Crustacea, and of the Medusae and Polyps.”  His request was granted, and for the next three years Huxley lived in London with his brother, on the exiguous income of an assistant-surgeon, and devoted himself to research.  He became almost at once of the first rank among English anatomists.  The result of the paper on Medusae in the Transactions of the Royal Society was that he was elected a Fellow of the Society on June 5, 1851, and a year later received a Royal Medal of the Society.  He made many warm friendships both among the older and the younger generations of scientific men.  In his obituary notice of Huxley, Sir Michael Foster wrote: 

“By Edward Forbes, in whose nature there was much that was akin to his own, and with whom he had some acquaintance before his voyage, he was at once greeted as a comrade, and with Joseph Dalton Hooker, to whom he was drawn at the very first by their common experience as navy surgeons, he began an attachment which, strengthened by like biological aspirations, grew closer as their lives went on.  In the first year after his return, in the autumn of 1851, he made the acquaintance of John Tyndall at the meeting of the British Association at Ipswich, and the three, Hooker, Huxley,