And as another review of the “Lay Sermons” puts it ("Nature” 3 22), he began to be made a kind of popular oracle, yet refused to prophesy smooth things.

During the earlier period, with more public demands made upon him than upon most men of science of his age and standing, with the burden of four Royal Commissions and increasing work in learned societies in addition to his regular lecturing and official paleontological work, and the many addresses and discourses in which he spread abroad in the popular mind the leaven of new ideas upon nature and education and the progress of thought, he was still constantly at work on biological researches of his own, many of which took shape in the Hunterian lectures at the College of Surgeons from 1863-1870.  But from 1870 onward, the time he could spare to such research grew less and less.  For eight years he was continuously on one Royal Commission after another.  His administrative work on learned societies continued to increase; in 1869-70 he held the presidency of the Ethnological Society, with a view to effecting the amalgamation with the Anthropological,] “the plan,” [as he calls it,] “for uniting the Societies which occupy themselves with man (that excludes ‘Society’ which occupies itself chiefly with woman).” [He became President of the Geological Society in 1872, and for nearly ten years, from 1871 to 1880, he was secretary of the Royal Society, an office which occupied no small portion of his time and thought, “for he had formed a very high ideal of the duties of the Society as the head of science in this country, and was determined that it should not at least fall short through any lack of exertion on his part” (Sir M. Foster, Royal Society Obituary Notice). (See Appendix 2.)

The year 1870 itself was one of the busiest he had ever known.  He published one biological and four paleontological memoirs, and sat on two Royal Commissions, one on the Contagious Diseases Acts, the other on Scientific Instruction, which continued until 1875.

The three addresses which he gave in the autumn, and his election to the School Board will be spoken of later; in the first part of the year he read two papers at the Ethnological Society, of which he was President, on “The Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind,” March 9—­and on “The Ethnology of Britain,” May 10—­the substance of which appeared in the “Contemporary Review” for July under the title of “Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology” ("Collected Essays” 7 253).  As President also of the Geological Society and of the British Association, he had two important addresses to deliver.  In addition to this, he delivered an address before the Y.M.C.A. at Cambridge on “Descartes’ Discourse.”

How busy he was may be gathered from his refusal of an invitation to Down:—­]

26 Abbey Place, January 21, 1870.

My dear Darwin,

It is hard to resist an invitation of yours—­but I dine out on Saturday; and next week three evenings are abolished by Societies of one kind or another.  And there is that horrid Geological address looming in the future!