governments of Britain, Germany, and the United States, were fitted
with every convenience for the staff of naturalists, and the luxuries
and comforts of civilisation attended them round the world. The late
Professor Mosely, for instance, who was a naturalist on the English
_Challenger_ expedition, told the present writer of a pleasant way in
which a peculiarity of the deep sea was made to pay toll to the
comfort of those on board ship. The great ocean depths all over the
world, under the burning skies of the tropics, or below the arctic
ice-fields, are extremely cold, the water at the bottom always being
only a few degrees above freezing point. When the dredge brought up a
sample of the abysmal mud at a convenient time, it was used to ice the
wine for the officers' mess. There was, however, no cooled champagne
for Huxley.

"Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes,
"was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was
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