principles, and exploring vessels will be invariably found to be the slowest, clumsiest, and in every respect the most inconvenient ships which wear the pennant.  In accordance with the rule, such was the “Rattlesnake”; and to carry out the spirit of the authorities more completely, she was turned out of Portsmouth dockyard in such a disgraceful state of unfitness, that her lower deck was continually under water during the voyage.

[Again, page 100:]

It is necessary to be provided with books of reference, which are ruinously expensive to a private individual, though a mere dewdrop in the general cost of the fitting out of a ship, especially as they might be kept in store, and returned at the end of a commission, like other stores.  A hundred pounds sterling would have well supplied the “Rattlesnake”; but she sailed without a volume, an application made by her captain not having been attended to.

[Page 103:]

Of all those who were actively engaged upon the survey, the young commander alone was destined by inevitable fate to be robbed of his just reward.  Care and anxiety, from the mobility of his temperament, sat not so lightly upon him as they might have done, and this, joined to the physical debility produced by the enervating climate of New Guinea, fairly wore him out, making him prematurely old before much more than half of the allotted span was completed.  But he died in harness, the end attained, the work that lay before him honourably done.  Which of us may dare to ask for more?  He has raised an enduring monument in his works, and his epitaph shall be the grateful thanks of many a mariner threading his way among the mazes of the Coral Sea.

[Page 104:]

The world enclosed within the timbers of a man-of-war is a most remarkable community, hardly to be rendered vividly intelligible to the mere landsman in these days of constitutional government and freedom of the press.

[Then follows a vigorous sketch of sea life from Chamisso, suggesting that the type of one’s relation to the captain is to be found in Jean Paul’s “Biography of the Twins,” who were united back to back.  This sketch Huxley enforces by a passage from the imaginary journal aforesaid,] “indited apparently when the chains were yet new and somewhat galled the writer,” [to judge from which] “little alteration would seem to have taken place in nautical life” [since Chamisso’s voyage, thirty years before.]

You tell me [he writes], that you sigh for my life of freedom and adventure; and that, compared with mine, the conventional monotony of your own stinks in your nostrils.  My dear fellow, be patient, and listen to what I have to say; you will then, perhaps, be a little more content with your lot in life, and a little less desirous of mine.  Of all extant lives, that on board a ship-of-war is the most artificial—­whether necessarily so or not is a question I will not undertake to decide; but the fact is indubitable.