clerk.  My friend Forbes, who is a highly distinguished and a very able man, gets the same from his office of Paleontologist to the Geological Survey of Great Britain.  Now, these are first-rate men—­men who have been at work for years laboriously toiling upward—­men whose abilities, had they turned them into the many channels of money-making, must have made large fortunes.  But the beauty of Nature and the pursuit of Truth allured them into a nobler life—­and this is the result...In literature a man may write for magazines and reviews, and so support himself; but not so in science.  I could get anything I write into any of the journals or any of the Transactions, but I know no means of thereby earning five shillings.  A man who chooses a life of science chooses not a life of poverty, but, so far as I can see, a life of nothing, and the art of living upon nothing at all has yet to be discovered.  You will naturally think, then, “Why persevere in so hopeless a course?” At present I cannot help myself.  For my own credit, for the sake of gratifying those who have hitherto helped me on—­nay, for the sake of truth and science itself, I must work out fairly and fully complete what I have begun.  And when that is done, I will courageously and cheerfully turn my back upon all my old aspirations.  The world is wide, and there is everywhere room for honesty of purpose and earnest endeavour.  Had I failed in attaining my wishes from an overweening self-confidence,—­had I found that the obstacles after all lay within myself—­I should have bitterly despised myself, and, worst of all, I should have felt that you had just ground of complaint.

So far as the acknowledgment of the value of what I have done is concerned, I have succeeded beyond my expectations, and if I have failed on the other side of the question, I cannot blame myself.  It is the world’s fault and not mine.

[A few months more, and he was able to report another and still more unexpected testimony to the value of his work—­another encouragement to persevere in the difficult pursuit of a scientific life.  He found himself treated as an equal by men of established reputation; and the first-fruits of his work ranked on a level with the maturer efforts of veterans in science.  He was within an ace of receiving the Royal Medal, which was awarded him the following year.  Of this, he writes:—­]

November 7, 1851.

I have at last tasted what it is to mingle with my fellows—­to take my place in that society for which nature has fitted me, and whether the draught has been a poison which has heated my veins or true nectar from the gods, life-giving, I know not, but I can no longer rest where I once could have rested.  If I could find within myself that mere personal ambition, the desire of fame, present or posthumous, had anything to do with this restlessness, I would root it out.  But in those moments of self-questioning, when one does not lie even to oneself, I feel that I can say it is not so—­that the real pleasure, the true sphere, lies in the feeling of self-development—­in the sense of power and of growing oneness with the great spirit of abstract truth.