[Wilt shape a noble life? Then cast No backward glances to the past. And what if something still be lost? Act as new-born in all thou dost. What each day wills, that shalt thou ask; Each day will tell its proper task; What others do, that shalt thou prize, In thine own work thy guerdon lies. This above all: hate none. The rest--Leave it to God. He knoweth best.] Half-past ten at night. Waiting for my child. I seem to fancy it the pledge that all these things shall be. Born five minutes before twelve. Thank God. New Year's Day, 1857. September 20, 1860. And the same child, our Noel, our first-born, after being for nearly four years our delight and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This day week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday his restless head, with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all day upon his pillow. On Saturday night the fifteenth, I carried him here into my study, and laid his cold still body here where I write. Here too on Sunday night came his mother and I to that holy leave-taking. My boy is gone, but in a higher and better sense than was in my mind when I wrote four years ago what stands above--I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say heartily and without bitterness--Amen, so let it be. CHAPTER 1.12. 1859-1860. [The programme laid down in 1857 was steadily carried out through a great part of 1859. Huxley published nine monographs, chiefly on fossil Reptilia, in the proceedings of the Geological Society and of the Geological Survey, one on the armour of crocodiles at the Linnean, and "Observations on the Development of some Parts of the Skeleton of Fishes," in the "Journal of Microscopical Science." Among the former was a paper on Stagonolepis, a creature from the Elgin beds, which had previously been ranked among the fishes. From some new remains, which he worked out of the stone with his own hands, Huxley made out that this was a reptile closely allied to the Crocodiles; and from this and the affinities of another fossil, Hyperodapedon, from neighbouring beds, determined the geological age to which the Elgin beds belonged. A good deal turned upon the nature of the scales from the back and belly of this animal, and a careful comparison with the scales of modern crocodiles--a subject till then little investigated--led to the paper at the Linnean already mentioned.