[It is a curious coincidence that, like two other leaders of science, Charles Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker, their close friend Huxley began his scientific career on board one of Her Majesty’s ships.  He was, however, to learn how little the British Government of that day, for all its professions, really cared for the advancement of knowledge. (The key to this attitude on the part of the Admiralty is to be found in the scathing description in Briggs’ “Naval Administration from 1827 to 1892” page 92, of the ruinous parsimony of either political party at this time with regard to the navy—­a policy the results of which were only too apparent at the outbreak of the Crimean war.  I quote a couple of sentences, “The navy estimates were framed upon the lowest scale, and reduction pushed to the very verge of danger.”  “Even from a financial point of view the course pursued was the reverse of economical, and ultimately led to wasteful and increased expenditure.”  Thus the liberal professions of the Admiralty were not fulfilled; its good will gave the young surgeon three and a half years of leave from active service; with an obdurate treasury, it could do no more.) But of the immense value to himself of these years of hard training, the discipline, the knowledge of men and of the capabilities of life, even without more than the barest necessities of existence—­of this he often spoke.  As he puts it in his Autobiography:—­]

Life on board Her Majesty’s ships 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 firearms—­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 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, christened “Buffons,” after the title conspicuous on a volume of the “Suites a Buffon,” which stood on my shelf in the chart-room.