For these expressions his conscience smote him when, on June 12, at a soiree of the Royal Society, Lord Rosse took him aside and informed him that he had seen Sir C. Trevelyan, the Under Secretary to the Treasury, who said there would be no difficulty in the matter if it were properly laid before the Prime Minister, Lord Derby.  To Lord Derby therefore he went, and was told that Mr. Huxley should go to the Treasury and arrange matters in person with Trevelyan.  At the same time the indignant tone of his letter to the Hydrographer seemed to have done good; he was invited to explain matters in person, and was granted the leave he asked for.

Everything now seemed to point to a speedy solution of his difficulties.  The promise of a grant, of course, did nothing immediate, but assured him a good position, and settled all the scruples of the Admiralty with regard to time.] “You have no notion,” [he writes,]” of the trouble the grant has cost me.  It died a natural death till I wrote to the Duke in March, and brought it to life again.  The more opposition there is, the more determined I am to carry it through.” [But he was doomed to a worse disappointment than before.  Trevelyan received him very civilly, but had heard nothing on the matter from Lord Derby, and accordingly sent him in charge of his private secretary to see Lord Derby’s secretary.  The latter had seen no papers relating to any such matter, and supposed Lord Derby had not brought them from St. James’ Square, “but promised to write to me as soon as anything was learnt.  I look upon it as adjourned sine die.”  Parliament breaking up immediately after gave the officials a good excuse for doing nothing more.

When his year’s leave expired in June 1853, he wrote the following letter to Sir William Burnett:—­]

As the period of my leave of absence from H.M.S.  “Fisguard” is about to expire, I have the honour to report that the duty on which I have been engaged has been carried out, as far as my means permit, by the publication of a “Memoir upon the Homologies of the Cephalous Mollusca,” with four plates, which appeared in the “Philosophical Transactions” for 1852 (published 1853), being the fourth memoir resulting from the observations made during the voyage of H.M.S.  “Rattlesnake” which has appeared in these “Transactions.”

I have the pleasure of being able to add that the President and Council of the Royal Society have considered these memoirs worthy of being rewarded by the Royal Medal in Physiology for 1852, which they did me the honour to confer in the November of that year.

I regret that no definite answer of any kind having as yet been given to the strong representations which were made by the Presidents both of the Royal Society and of the British Association in 1852 to H.M.  Government—­representations which have recently been earnestly repeated—­in order to obtain a grant for the purpose of publishing the remainder of these researches in a separate form, I have been unable to proceed any further, and I beg to request a renewal of my leave of absence from H.M.S.  “Fisguard,” so that if H.M.  Government think fit to give the grant applied for, it may be in my power to make use of it; or that, should it be denied, I may be enabled to find some other means of preventing the total loss of the labour of some years.