Nevertheless I have the strongest persuasion that four years hence I shall be married and settled in England. We shall see.

I am getting on capitally at present. Habit, inclination, and now a sense of duty keep me at work, and the nature of our cruise affords me opportunities such as none but a blind man would fail to make use of. I have sent two or three papers home already to be published, which I have great hopes will throw light upon some hitherto obscure branches of natural history, and I have just finished a more important one, which I intend to get read at the Royal Society. The other day I submitted it to William Macleay (the celebrated propounder of the Quinary system), who has a beautiful place near Sydney, and, I hear, "werry much approves what I have done." All this goes to the comforting side of the question, and gives me hope of being able to follow out my favourite pursuits in course of time, without hindrance to what is now the main object of my life. I tell Netty to look to being a "Frau Professorin" one of these odd days, and she has faith, as I believe would have if I told her I was going to be Prime Minister.

We go to the northward again about the 23rd of this month [April], and shall be away for ten or twelve months surveying in Torres Straits. I believe we are to refit in Port Essington, and that will be the only place approaching to civilisation that we shall see for the whole of that time; and after July or August next, when a provision ship is to come up to us, we shall not even get letters. I hope and trust I shall hear from you before then. Do not suppose that my new ties have made me forgetful of old ones. On the other hand, these are if anything strengthened. Does not my dearest Nettie love you as I do! and do I not often wish that you could see and love and esteem her as I know you would. We often talk about you, and I tell her stories of old times.

[Another letter, a year later, gives his mother the answers to a string of questions which, mother-like, she had asked him, thirsting for exact and minute information about her future daughter-in-law:--]

Sydney, February 1, 1849.

[After describing how he had just come back from a nine months' cruise)--First and foremost, my dear mother, I must thank you for your very kind letter of September 1848. I read the greater part of it to Nettie, who was as much pleased as I with your kindly wishes towards both of us. Now I suppose I must do my best to answer your questions. First, as to age, Nettie is about three months younger than myself--that is the difference in OUR years, but she is IN FACT as much younger than her years as I am older than mine. Next, as to complexion she is exceedingly fair, with the Saxon yellow hair and blue eyes. Then as to face, I really don't know whether she is pretty or not. I have never been able to decide the matter in my own mind. Sometimes I think she is, and sometimes I wonder how the idea ever came into my head. Whether or not, her personal appearance has nothing whatever to do with the hold she has upon my mind, for I have seen hundreds of prettier women. But I never met with so sweet a temper, so self-sacrificing and affectionate a disposition, or so pure and womanly a mind, and from the perfectly intimate footing on which I stand with her family I have plenty of opportunities of judging. As I tell her, the only great folly I am aware of her being guilty of was the leaving her happiness in the hands of a man like myself, struggling upwards and certain of nothing.

As to my future intentions I can say very little about them. With my present income, of course, marriage is rather a bad look out, but I do not think it would be at all fair towards Nettie herself to leave this country without giving her a wife's claim upon me...It is very unlikely I shall ever remain in the colony. Nothing but a very favourable chance could induce me to do so.

Much must depend upon how things go in England. If my various papers meet with any success, I may perhaps be able to leave the service. At present, however, I have not heard a word of anything I have sent. Professor Forbes has, I believe, published some of Macgillivary's letters to him, but he has apparently forgotten to write to Macgillivray himself, or to me. So I shall certainly send him nothing more, especially as Mr. Macleay (of this place, and a great man in the naturalist world) has offered to get anything of mine sent to the Zoological Society.

[In the paper mentioned in the letter of March 21, above ("On the Anatomy and Affinities of the Family of the Medusae"), Huxley aimed at] "giving broad and general views of the whole class, considered as organised upon a given type, and inquiring into its relations with other families," [unlike previous observers whose patience and ability had been devoted rather to] "stating matters of detail concerning particular genera and species." [At the outset, section 8 ("Science Memoirs" 1 11), he states--]

I would wish to lay particular stress upon the composition of this (the stomach) and other organs of the Medusae out of TWO DISTINCT MEMBRANES, as I believe that it is one of the essential peculiarities of their structure, and that a knowledge of the fact is of great importance in investigating their homologies. I will call these two membranes as such, and independently of any modifications into particular organs, "foundation membranes."

[And in section 56 (page 23) one of the general conclusions which he deduces from his observations, is]

That a Medusa consists essentially of two membranes enclosing a variously-shaped cavity, inasmuch as its various organs are so composed,

[a peculiarity shared by certain other families of zoophytes. This is a point which that eminent authority, Professor G.J. Allman, had in his mind when he wrote to call my attention

"to a fact which has been overlooked in all the notices I have seen, and which I regard as one of the greatest claims of his splendid work on the recognition of zoologists. I refer to his discovery that the body of the Medusae is essentially composed of two membranes, an outer and an inner, and his recognition of these as the homologues of the two primary germinal leaflets in the vertebrate embryo. Now this discovery stands at the very basis of a philosophic zoology, and of a true conception of the affinities of animals. It is the ground on which Haeckel has founded his famous Gastraea Theory, and without it Kowalesky could never have announced his great discovery of the affinity of the Ascidians and Vertebrates, by which zoologists had been startled."]

CHAPTER 1.4.

1848-1850.

[The whole cruise of the "Rattlesnake" lasted almost precisely four years, her stay in Australian waters nearly three. Of this time altogether eleven months were spent at Sydney, namely, July 16 to October 11, 1847; January 14 to February 2, and March 9 to April 29, 1848; January 24 to May 8, 1849; and February 14 to May 2, 1850. The three months of the first northern cruise were spent in the survey of the Inshore Passage--the passage, that is, within the Great Barrier Reef for ships proceeding from India to Sydney. In 1848, while waiting for the right season to visit Torres Straits, a short cruise was made in February and March, to inspect the lighthouses in Bass' Straits. It was on this occasion that Huxley visited Melbourne, then an insignificant town, before the discovery of gold had brought a rush of immigrants.

The second northern cruise of 1848, which lasted nine months, had for its object the completion of the survey of the Inner Passage as far as New Guinea and the adjoining archipelago. The third cruise in 1849-50 again lasted nine months, and continued the survey in Torres Straits, the Louisiade archipelago, and the south-eastern part of New Guinea. After this the original plan was to make a fourth cruise, filling up the charts of the Inner Passage on the east coast, and surveying the straits of Alass between Lombok and Sumbawa in the Malay Archipelago; then, instead of returning to Sydney, to proceed to Singapore and so home by the Cape. But these plans were altered by the untimely death of Captain Stanley on March 13, and the "Rattlesnake" sailed for England direct in May 1850.

There was a great monotony about these cruises, particularly to those who were not constantly engaged in the active work of surveying. The ship sailed slowly from place to place, hunting out reefs and islets; a stay of a few days would be made at some lonely island, while charting expeditions went out in the boats or supplies of water and fresh fruits were laid in. On the second expedition there were two cases of scurvy on board by the time the mail from Sydney reached the ship at Cape York with letters and lime-juice, the first reminder of civilisation for four months and a half. On this cruise there was an unusual piece of interest in Kennedy's ill-fated expedition, which the "Rattlesnake" landed in Rockingham Bay, and trusted to meet again at Cape York. Happy it was for Huxley that his duties forbade him to accept Kennedy's proposal to join the expedition. After months of weary struggles in the dense scrub, Kennedy himself, who had pushed on for help with his faithful black man Jacky, was speared by the natives when almost in sight of Cape York; Jack barely managed to make his way there through his enemies, and guided a party to the rescue of the two starved and exhausted survivors of the disease-stricken camp by the Sugarloaf Hill. It was barely time. Another hour, and they too would have been killed by the crowd of blackfellows who hovered about in hopes of booty, and were only dispersed for a moment by the rescue party.

On the third cruise there were a few adventures more directly touching the "Rattlesnake." Twice the landing parties, including Huxley, were within an ace of coming to blows with the islanders of the Louisiades, and on one occasion a portly member of the gun-room, being cut off by these black gentry, only saved his life by parting with all his clothes as presents to them, and keeping them amused by an impromptu dance in a state of nature under the broiling sun, until a party came to his relief. At Cape York also, a white woman was rescued who had been made prisoner by the blacks from a wreck, and had lived among them for several years. Here, too, Huxley and Macgillivray made a trip inland, and were welcomed by a native chief, who saw in the former the returning spirit of his dead brother.

Throughout the voyage Huxley was busy with his pencil, and many lithographs from his drawings illustrate the account of the voyage afterwards published. As to his scientific work, he was accumulating a large stock of observations, but felt rather sore about the papers which he had already sent home, for no word had reached him as to their fate, not even that they had been received or looked over by Forbes, to whom they had been consigned. As a matter of fact, they had not been neglected, as he was to find out on his return; but meanwhile the state of affairs was not reassuring to a man whose dearest hopes were bound up in the reception he could win for these and similar researches. Altogether, it was with no little joy that he turned his back on the sweltering heat of Torres Straits, on the great mountains of New Guinea, the Owen Stanley range, which had remained hidden from D'Urville in the "Astrolabe" to be discovered by the explorers on the "Rattlesnake," and the far stretching archipelago of the Louisiades, one tiny island in which still bears the name of Huxley, after the assistant-surgeon of the "Rattlesnake."

A few extracts from letters of the time will give a more vivid idea of what the voyage was like. The first is from a letter to his mother,