"I have steadily been gaining ground, and really believe now I shall some day be quite strong. I write daily for a couple of hours on my Coral volume, and take a little walk or ride every day. I grow very tired in the evenings, and am not able to go out at that time, or hardly to receive my nearest relations; but my life ceases to be burdensome now that I can do something."
The manuscript of Coral Reefs was at last sent to the printers in January 1842, and the last proof corrected in May. He thus writes of the work in his diary:—
"I commenced this work three years and seven months ago. Out of this period about twenty months (besides work during Beagle's voyage) has been spent on it, and besides it, I have only compiled the Bird part of Zoology; Appendix to Journal, paper on Boulders, and corrected papers on Glen Roy and earthquakes, reading on species, and rest all lost by illness."
The latter part of this year belongs to the period including the settlement at Down, and is therefore dealt with in another chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[97] The Museum of the Zoological Society, then at 33 Bruton Street. The collection was some years later broken up and dispersed.
[98] William Lonsdale, b. 1794, d. 1871, was originally in the army, and served at the battles of Salamanca and Waterloo. After the war he left the service and gave himself up to science. He acted as assistant-secretary to the Geological Society from 1829-42, when he resigned, owing to ill-health.
[99] T. Bell, F.R.S., formerly Professor of Zoology in King's College, London, and sometime secretary to the Royal Society. He afterwards described the reptiles for the Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle.
[100] I have often heard him speak of the despair with which he had to break off the projecting extremity of a huge, partly excavated bone, when the boat waiting for him would wait no longer.
[101] A trifling record of my father's presence in Cambridge occurs in the book kept in Christ's College Combination-room, in which fines and bets are recorded, the earlier entries giving a curious impression of the after-dinner frame of mind of the Fellows. The bets are not allowed to be made in money, but are, like the fines, paid in wine. The bet which my father made and lost is thus recorded:—