At last the
Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose, cut short the discussion by
ordering me to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and as
Rastignac,[14] in the Pere Goriot [15] says to Paris, I said to London
"a nous deux." I desired to obtain a Professorship of either Physiology
or Comparative Anatomy, and as vacancies occurred I applied, but in
vain. My friend, Professor Tyndall,[16] and I were candidates at the
same time, he for the 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.
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