wrote what he had done and had set himself to do in the way of
increasing his knowledge. Self-conducted, also, was his later education
at the Charing Cross Hospital. Here, like Stevenson in his university
days, Huxley seemed to be idle, but in reality, he was always busy on
his own private end. So constantly did he work over the microscope that
the window at which he sat came to be dubbed by his fellow students "The
Sign of the Head and Microscope." Moreover, in his regular courses at
Charing Cross, he seems to have done work sufficiently notable to be
recognized by several prizes and a gold medal.

Of his life after the completion of his medical course, of his
search for work, of his appointment as assistant surgeon on board the
Rattlesnake, and of his scientific work during the four years' cruise,
Huxley gives a vivid description in the autobiography. As a result of
his investigations on this voyage, he published various essays which
quickly secured for him a position in the scientific world as a
naturalist of the first rank. A testimony of the value of this work was
his election to membership in the Royal Society.

Although Huxley had now, at the age of twenty-six, won distinction
in science, he soon discovered that it was not so easy to earn bread
thereby. Nevertheless, to earn a living was most important if he were to
accomplish the two objects which he had in view. He wished, in the first
place, to marry Miss Henrietta Heathorn of Sydney, to whom he had become
engaged when on the cruise with the Rattlesnake; his second object
was to follow science as a profession. The struggle to find something
connected with science which would pay was long and bitter; and only a
resolute determination to win kept Huxley from abandoning it altogether.
Uniform ill-luck met him everywhere. He has told in his autobiography
of his troubles with the Admiralty in the endeavor to get his papers