secured for her the protection of one of the principal men of the tribe.  This person, acting upon the belief, universal throughout Australia and the islands of the Torres Strait, so far as hitherto known, that white people are the ghosts of the aborigines, fancied that in the stranger he recognised a long-lost daughter, and at once admitted her into the relationship which he thought had formerly subsisted between them.  She was immediately acknowledged by the whole tribe as one of themselves, thus securing an extensive connection in relatives of all denominations.  The headquarters of the tribe being on an island which all vessels passing through the Torres Strait from the eastward must approach within two or three miles, she had the mortification of seeing from twenty to thirty or more ships go through every summer without anchoring in the neighbourhood, so as to afford the slightest opportunity of making her escape.  Last year she heard of our two vessels being at Cape York, only twenty miles distant from some of the tribe who had communicated with us and had been well treated, but they would not take her over and watched her even more narrowly than before.  On our second and present visit, however, which the Cape York people immediately announced by smoke signals to their friends, she was successful in persuading some of her more immediate friends to bring her across to the mainland within a short distance of where the vessels lay.  The blacks were credulous enough to believe that as she had been so long with them and had been so well treated, she did not intend to leave them,—­only ’she felt a strong desire to see the white people once more and shake hands with them’:  adding that she would be certain to purchase some axes, knives, tobacco, and other much-prized articles.”

Although the external adventures of the Rattlesnake party were less varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of the most surprising kind.  It was a four-years’ course in the great university of nature, and when he had finished it he was no longer a mere student, capricious and unsettled in his mental tastes and inclinations, but had set his face steadily towards his future life-work.  It is interesting to compare the importance in Huxley’s life of the Rattlesnake voyage with the importance in Darwin’s life of the voyage on the Beagle undertaken some fifteen years earlier.  Huxley, when he started, was a young surgeon with a taste of a vague kind for dissecting and for drawing the peculiarities of structure of different animals revealed by the knife and the microscope.  Day after day, month after month, year after year, in the abundant leisure his slight professional duties left him, he dissected and drew, dissected and drew, animal after animal, as he got them from the dredge or tow-net, or from the surface