His tiny cabin was light enough to work in on a dull day;
but as for the possibility of making a scientific collection, it was
but seven feet by six, by five feet six inches high, and infested with
cockroaches to boot.
His work took shape in a mass of drawings and descriptions from the
dissection of the perishable marine organisms of the tropical seas,
and, yet more important, in the new classification he established upon
anatomical grounds. His first papers were sent to the Linnean Society
by Captain Stanley; the later and more important he sent himself to
Edward Forbes, the most interested and helpful of the biologists
to whom he had been introduced before he left England. To his angry
disappointment, no news of them, no acknowledgment even, reached him
on the other side of the world; it was not till he returned, after the
four years of his voyage, that he found they had been published by
the Royal Society, and had established his reputation as a first-rate
investigator. But, though with much difficulty the scientific
authorities enabled him to secure the promised Government grant for
his book, and a temporary billet ashore while he worked at it, he was
only able to publish his _Oceanic Hydrozoa_; a vast quantity of his
researches remained unpublished, and subsequent investigators, going
over the same ground, won the credit for them.
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