Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work | Page 8

was feared that in the event of hostilities breaking
out, the zeal of the officers for their country might tempt them to
transcend their peaceful occupation. The instructions with regard to this
ran as follows:
"In the event of this country being involved in hostilities during your
absence, you will take care never to be surprised; but you are to refrain
from any act of aggression towards the vessels or settlements of any
nation with which we may be at war, as expeditions employed on
behalf of discovery and science have always been considered by all
civilised communities as acting under a general safeguard."
The great scientific expeditions sent out in recent times by the
governments of Britain, Germany, and the United States, were fitted
with every convenience for the staff of naturalists, and the luxuries and
comforts of civilisation attended them round the world. The late
Professor Mosely, for instance, who was a naturalist on the English

Challenger expedition, told the present writer of a pleasant way in
which a peculiarity of the deep sea was made to pay toll to the comfort
of those on board ship. The great ocean depths all over the world, under
the burning skies of the tropics, or below the arctic ice-fields, are
extremely cold, the water at the bottom always being only a few
degrees above freezing point. When the dredge brought up a sample of
the abysmal mud at a convenient time, it was used to ice the wine for
the officers' mess. There was, however, no cooled champagne for
Huxley.
"Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes, "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 latest voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could
be possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire-arms--as we
did on the south coast of New Guinea--and of making acquaintances
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 necessities; to find out 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 myself 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 à Buffon_ which stood on my shelf in the chart-room."
Huxley was only the surgeon on board the Rattlesnake, and his pursuit
of natural history was his own affair. There was a special naturalist
appointed to the expedition, no doubt chosen because four years earlier,
as assistant to Professor Jukes, he had been attached as naturalist to the

expedition of the Fly in the same waters. His name was John
MacGillivray, and he was the son of an exceedingly able naturalist
whose reputation has been overshadowed by the greater names of the
middle century. William MacGillivray, the father, sometime professor
at the University of Aberdeen, was one of those driven by an almost
instinctive desire to the study of nature. In his youth, when he was a
poor lad, desiring to see as much as possible of his native land, and
above all to visit the great museums and libraries of the south, he
walked from Aberdeen to London with no luggage but a copy of
Smith's Flora Britannica. He was an ardent botanist, a collector of
insects and molluscs, and one of the pioneers in the anatomy of birds.
There are many curious allusions in his writings which seem to shew
that he too was beginning to doubt the fixity of species, and to guess at
the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest which the great
Darwin was the first to make a part of the knowledge of the world. It
must be confessed that his son John, the companion of Huxley, had
little of his father's ability. He was three years older than Huxley, and
broke off his medical course at the University