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 a 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