efore long
to active service upon another ship. But he had no intention of
relapsing into the position of a mere navy doctor; he had accumulated
sufficient scientific material to keep him employed on scientific
investigation for years, and so he applied to the Admiralty to "be
borne on the books" of H.M.S. _Fisgard_ at Woolwich,--that is to say,
to be appointed assistant-surgeon to the ship "for particular
service," so that he should not be compelled to live on board, but
might remain in town, and, with free access to libraries and museums,
work up the observations he had made on the _Rattlesnake_ into serious
and substantial contributions to science. His request was granted,
largely by the aid of his old chief, Sir W. Burnett, who continued to
take the most useful interest in the young man he had originally
nominated to the service. In a letter to him Huxley described the
investigations which he desired to continue as being chiefly those on
"the anatomy of certain Gasteropod and Pteropod Mollusca, of Firola
and Atlantis, of Salpa and Pyrosoma, of two new Ascidians, namely,
Appendicularia and Doliolum, of Sagitta and certain Annelids, of the
auditory and circulatory organs of certain transparent Crustacea, and
of the Medusae and Polyps." His request was granted, and for the next
three years Huxley lived in London with his brother, on the exiguous
income of an assistant-surgeon, and devoted himself to research. He
became almost at once of the first rank among English anatomists. The
result of the paper on Medusae in the _Transactions of the Royal
Society_ was that he was elected a Fellow of the Society on June 5,
1851, and a year later received a Royal Medal of the Society. He made
many warm friendships both among the older and the younger generations
of scientific men. In his obituary notice of Huxley, Sir Michael
Foster wrote:

"By Edward Forbes, in whose nature there was much that was akin
to his own, and with whom he had some acquaintance before his
voyage, he was at once greeted as a comrade, and with Joseph
Dalton Hooker, to whom he was drawn at the very first by their
common experience as navy surgeons, he began an attachment which,
strengthened by like biological aspirations, grew closer as their
lives went on. In the first year after his return, in the autumn
of 1851, he made the acquaintance of John Tyndall at the meeting
of the British Association at Ipswich, and t