e Chair of Physics and I for that of Natural History
in the University of Toronto, which, fortunately, as it turned out,
would not look at either of us. I say fortunately, not from any lack of
respect for Toronto, but because I soon made up my mind that London was
the place for me, and hence I have steadily declined the inducements to
leave it, which have at various times been offered. At last, in 1854, on
the translation of my warm friend Edward Forbes, to Edinburgh, Sir Henry
de la Beche, the Director-General of the Geological Survey, offered
me the post Forbes vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on Natural
History. I refused the former point blank, and accepted the latter only
provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils,
and that I should give up Natural History as soon as I could get a
physiological post. But I held the office for thirty-one years, and a
large part of my work has been paleontological.

At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a firm conviction that
I should break down every time I opened my mouth. I believe I had every
fault a speaker could have (except talking at random or indulging
in rhetoric), when I spoke to the first important audience I ever
addressed, on a Friday evening at the Royal Institution, in 1852. Yet,
I must confess to having been guilty, malgre moi, of as much public
speaking as most of my contemporaries, and for the last ten years it
ceased to be so much of a bugbear to me. I used to pity myself for
having to go through this training, but I am now more disposed to
compassionate the unfortunate audiences, especially my ever friendly
hearers at the Royal Institution, who were the subjects of my oratorical
experiments.

The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be to speak of
the work of my life, or to say at the end of the day whether I think
I have earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges
of themselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men are. Life seems
terribly foreshortened as they look back and the mountain they set
themselves to climb in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably
higher ranges when, by failing breath, they reach the top. But if I may
speak of the objects I have had more or less definitely in view since I
began the ascent of my hillock, they are briefly these: To promote
the increase of natural knowledge and to forward the application of
scientific methods of investigation to all the prob