smooth things.

During the earlier period, with more public demands made upon him than
upon most men of science of his age and standing, with the burden of
four Royal Commissions and increasing work in learned societies in
addition to his regular lecturing and official paleontological work,
and the many addresses and discourses in which he spread abroad in the
popular mind the leaven of new ideas upon nature and education and the
progress of thought, he was still constantly at work on biological
researches of his own, many of which took shape in the Hunterian
lectures at the College of Surgeons from 1863-1870. But from 1870
onward, the time he could spare to such research grew less and less.
For eight years he was continuously on one Royal Commission after
another. His administrative work on learned societies continued to
increase; in 1869-70 he held the presidency of the Ethnological
Society, with a view to effecting the amalgamation with the
Anthropological,] "the plan," [as he calls it,] "for uniting the
Societies which occupy themselves with man (that excludes 'Society'
which occupies itself chiefly with woman)." [He became President of
the Geological Society in 1872, and for nearly ten years, from 1871 to
1880, he was secretary of the Royal Society, an office which occupied
no small portion of his time and thought, "for he had formed a very
high ideal of the duties of the Society as the head of science in this
country, and was determined that it should not at least fall short
through any lack of exertion on his part" (Sir M. Foster, Royal
Society Obituary Notice). (See Appendix 2.)

The year 1870 itself was one of the busiest he had ever known. He
published one biological and four paleontological memoirs, and sat on
two Royal Commissions, one on the Contagious Diseases Acts, the other