People talk about the satisfaction of an approving conscience.  Mine approves me intensely; but I’ll be hanged if I see the satisfaction of it.  I feel much more inclined to swear “worse than our armies in Flanders."...So far as my private doings are concerned, I hear very satisfactory news of them.  I heard from an old messmate of mine at Haslar the other day that Dr. MacWilliam, F.R.S., one of our deputy-inspectors, had been talking about one of my papers, and gave him to understand that it was to be printed.  Furthermore, he is a great advocate for the claims of assistant surgeons to ward-room rank, and all that sort of stuff, and, I am told, quoted me as an example!  Henceforward I look upon the learned doctor as a man of sound sense and discrimination!  Without joking, however, I am glad to have come under his notice, as he may be of essential use to me.  I find myself getting horribly selfish, looking at everything with regard to the influence it may have on my grand objects.

[Further descriptions of the voyage are to be drawn from an article in the “Westminster Review” for January 1854 (volume 5), in which, under the title of “Science at Sea,” Huxley reviewed the “Voyage of the ‘Rattlesnake’” by Macgillivray, the naturalist to the expedition, which had recently appeared.  This book gave very few descriptions of the incidents and life on board, and so drew in many ways a colourless picture of the expedition.  This defect the reviewer sought to remedy by giving extracts from the so-called “unpublished correspondence” of one of the officers—­sketches apparently written for the occasion—­as well as from an equally unpublished but more real journal kept by the same hand.

The description of the ship herself, of her inadequate equipment for the special purposes she was to carry out, of the officers’ quiet contempt of scientific pursuits, which not even the captain’s influence was able to subdue, of the illusory promises of help and advancement held out by the Admiralty to young investigators, makes a striking foil to the spirit in which the Government of thirty years later undertook a greater scientific expedition.  Perhaps some vivid recollections of this voyage did something to better the conditions under which the later investigators worked.

Thus, page 100:]

In the year 1846, Captain Owen Stanley, a young and zealous officer, of good report for his capabilities as a scientific surveyor, was entrusted with the command of the “Rattlesnake,” a vessel of six-and-twenty guns, strong and seaworthy, but one of that class unenviably distinguished in the war-time as a “donkey-frigate.”  To the laity it would seem that a ship journeying to unknown regions, when the lives of a couple of hundred men may, at any moment, depend upon her handiness in going about, so as to avoid any suddenly discovered danger, should possess the best possible sailing powers.  The Admiralty, however, makes its selection upon other