ing ships, when letters would take five months
or more to receive an answer, which by that time might be entirely at
cross purposes with the changed aspect of affairs. The possibilities
of estrangement were incalculable. Their lives were developing on
entirely different lines. He had been admitted to the inmost circle of
men of science as an intellectual peer; he was elected F.R.S. when
he was barely twenty-six, and received the Royal Medal the following
year, as well as being chosen to serve on the Council of the Society;
he wrote; he lectured at the Royal Institution. And yet, with all the
support of the leaders in science, he could not find any post wherein
to earn his bread and butter. He stood for professorships at
Toronto, at Sydney, at Aberdeen, Cork and King's College, London.
The Admiralty, in March, 1854, even refused further leave for the
publication of the scientific work to do which he had been sent out.
He took the bull by the horns, and, rather than return to the hopeless
routine of a naval surgeon, let the Admiralty fulfil their threat to
deprive him of his appointment, and the slender pay which was his
only certain support. His scientific friends besought him to hold on;
something must come in his way, and a brilliant career was before him;
but was he justified, he asked himself again and again, in pursuing
the glorious phantom, so miserably paid at the best, instead of taking
up some business career, perhaps in Australia, and ending the cruel
delay which bore so hardly upon the woman he loved? Yet would not this
be a desertion of his manifest duty, his intellectual duty to himself
and to Science? He knew full well that there was only one course which
could bring him either hope or peace, and yet, between the two calls
upon him, he never knew which course he would ultimately follow.

[Illustration: From a Daguerrotype made in 1846]

For her there was no such mental development. Assuredly she kept up
her literary pursuits, her study of German, in which they had found
common ground of interest, for she had spent two years at school in
Germany; but she was cribbed and cabined by the ups and downs of early
colonial life, and the fluctuating ventures upon which her father
delighted to embark; there was, naturally, no possibility of her
moving in the stimulating intellectual society which was his, and
hope deferred wore upon her as the laurels of scientific success were
consistently followed by failure in al