"Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes, "was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being about the latest voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire-arms--as we did on the south coast of New Guinea--and of making acquaintances with a variety of interesting savage and semi-civilised people. But apart from experience of this kind, and the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me personally the cruise was extremely valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessities; to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank with the sky for canopy, and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast; and more especially to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I myself along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows as sailors ought to be, and generally are, but naturally they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends the middies christened 'Buffons,' after the title conspicuous on a volume of the _Suites à Buffon_ which stood on my shelf in the chart-room."