My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY WORK 217and my volume on " Natural Selection " in the followingMarch.I may here state that although the proceeds ofmy eight years' collecting in the East brought mein a sufficient income to live quietly as a single man,I was always on the look-out for some permanentcongenial employment which would yet leave timefor the study of my collections. The possibility ofever earning anything substantialeither by lecturingor by writing never occurred to me. My deficientorgan of language prevented me from ever becominga good lecturer or having any taste for it, while theexperience of my first work on "The Amazon" didnot encourage me to think that I could write anythingThe firstthat would much more than pay expenses.vacancy that occurred was the assistant secretaryshipof the Royal Geographical Society, for which Batesand myself were candidates. Bates had just publishedhis "Naturalist on the Amazon," and was, besides,much better qualified than myself by his businessexperience and his knowledge of German, which hehad taught himself when abroad. Besides, the confinementand the London life would, I am sure, havesoon become uncongenial to me, and would, I feelequally certain, have greatly shortened my life. Iam therefore glad I did not get it, and I do not thinkI felt any disappointment at the time. Becomingtired of London and wishing for a country life, Itook a small house at Barking in 1870, and in 1871leased four acres of ground at Grays, including avery picturesque well-timbered old chalk-pit, abovewhich I built a house having a very fine view acrossto the hills of North Kent and down a reach of theThames to Gravesend.