tention shewn her,
for a long time evinced anything but kindness. A curious
circumstance secured for her the protection of one of the
principal men of the tribe. This person, acting upon the belief,
universal throughout Australia and the islands of the Torres
Strait, so far as hitherto known, that white people are the
ghosts of the aborigines, fancied that in the stranger he
recognised a long-lost daughter, and at once admitted her into
the relationship which he thought had formerly subsisted between
them. She was immediately acknowledged by the whole tribe as one
of themselves, thus securing an extensive connection in relatives
of all denominations. The headquarters of the tribe being on an
island which all vessels passing through the Torres Strait from
the eastward must approach within two or three miles, she had the
mortification of seeing from twenty to thirty or more ships go
through every summer without anchoring in the neighbourhood, so
as to afford the slightest opportunity of making her escape. Last
year she heard of our two vessels being at Cape York, only twenty
miles distant from some of the tribe who had communicated with us
and had been well treated, but they would not take her over and
watched her even more narrowly than before. On our second and
present visit, however, which the Cape York people immediately
announced by smoke signals to their friends, she was successful
in persuading some of her more immediate friends to bring her
across to the mainland within a short distance of where the
vessels lay. The blacks were credulous enough to believe that as
she had been so long with them and had been so well treated, she
did not intend to leave them,--only 'she felt a strong desire to
see the white people once more and shake hands with them': adding
that she would be certain to purchase some axes, knives, tobacco,
and other much-prized articles."

Although the external adventures of the _Rattlesnake_ party were less
varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four
years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental
adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of
the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' course in the great
university of nature, and when he had finished it he was no longer a
mere studen