Here he had little enough of mental discipline, or that deliberate training of character which is a leading object of modern education. On the contrary, what he learnt was a knowledge of undisciplined human nature.]

My regular school training [he tells us], was of the briefest, perhaps fortunately; for though my way of life has made me acquainted with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle for existence among ourselves; bullying was the least of the ill practices current among us. Almost the only cheerful reminiscence in connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a battle I had with one of my classmates, who had bullied me until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was a wild-cat element in me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight, and I licked my adversary effectually. However, one of my first experiences of the extremely rough-and-ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the course of things in general, arose out of the fact that I--the victor--had a black eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and thereafter I was unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life was to be told a dozen years afterwards by the groom who brought me my horse in a stable-yard in Sydney that he was my quondam antagonist. He had a long story of family misfortune to account for his position; but at that time it was necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that the unfortunate young man had not only been "sent out," but had undergone more than one colonial conviction.

[His brief school career was happily cut short by the break up of the Ealing establishment. On the death of Dr. Nicholas, his sons attempted to carry on the school; but the numbers declined rapidly, and George Huxley, about 1835, returned to his native town of Coventry, where he obtained the modest post of manager of the Coventry savings bank, while his daughters eked out the slender family resources by keeping school.

In the meantime the boy Tom, as he was usually called, got little or no regular instruction. But he had an inquiring mind, and a singularly early turn for metaphysical speculation. He read everything he could lay hands on in his father's library. Not satisfied with the ordinary length of the day, he used, when a boy of twelve, to light his candle before dawn, pin a blanket round his shoulders, and sit up in bed to read Hutton's "Geology." He discussed all manner of questions with his parents and friends, for his quick and eager mind made it possible for him to have friendships with people considerably older than himself. Among these may especially be noted his medical brother-in-law, Dr. Cooke of Coventry, who had married his sister Ellen in 1839, and through whom he early became interested in human anatomy; and George Anderson May, at that time in business at Hinckley (a small weaving centre some dozen miles distant from Coventry), whom his friends who knew him afterwards in the home which he made for himself on the farm at Elford, near Tamworth, will remember for his genial spirit and native love of letters. There was a real friendship between the two. The boy of fifteen notes down with pleasure his visits to the man of six-and-twenty, with whom he could talk freely of the books he read, and the ideas he gathered about philosophy.

Afterwards, however, their ways lay far apart, and I believe they did not meet again until the seventies, when Mr. May sent his children to be educated in London, and his youngest son was at school with me; his younger daughter studied art at the Slade school with my sisters, and both found a warm welcome in the home circle at Marlborough Place.

One of his boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if their qualities were taken away; and lighting upon Sir William Hamilton's "Logic," he devoured it to such good effect that when, years afterwards, he came to tackle the greater philosophers, especially the English and the German, he found he had already a clear notion of where the key of metaphysic lay.

This early interest in metaphysics was another form of the intense curiosity to discover the motive principle of things, the why and how they act, that appeared in the boy's love of engineering and of anatomy. The unity of this motive and the accident which bade fair to ruin his life at the outset, and actually levied a lifelong tax upon his bodily vigour, are best told in his own words:--]

As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but the fates were against this, and while very young I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus infidelium. I am now occasionally horrified to think how little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of healing. The only part of my professional course which really and deeply interested me was physiology, which is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and, notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business, the working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attraction I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living structure nearly proved fatal to me at the outset. I was a mere boy--I think between thirteen and fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older student friends of mine to the first post-mortem examination I ever attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison supervened, but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring morning after my arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day the faint odour of wood-smoke, like that which floated across the farmyard in the early morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." I soon recovered, but for years I suffered from occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time my constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his half-century of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle.

[Some little time after his return from the voyage of the "Rattlesnake," Huxley succeeded in tracing his good Warwickshire friends again. A letter of May 11, 1852, from one of them, Miss K. Jaggard, tells how they had lost sight of the Huxleys after their departure from Coventry; how they were themselves dispersed by death, marriage, or retirement; and then proceeds to draw a lively sketch of the long delicate-looking lad, which clearly refers to this period or a little later.]

My brother and sister who were living at Grove Fields when you visited there, have now retired from the cares of business, and are living very comfortably at Leamington...I suppose you remember Mr. Joseph Russell, who used to live at Avon Dassett. He is now married and gone to live at Grove Fields, so that it is still occupied by a person of the same name as when you knew it. But it is very much altered in appearance since the time when such merry and joyous parties of aunts and cousins used to assemble there. I assure you we have often talked of "Tom Huxley" (who was sometimes one of the party) looking so thin and ill, and pretending to make hay with one hand, while in the other he held a German book! Do you remember it? And the picnic at Scar Bank? And how often too your patience was put to the test in looking for your German books which had been hidden by some of those playful companions who were rather less inclined for learning than yourself?

[It is interesting to see from this letter and from a journal, to be quoted hereafter, that he had thus early begun to teach himself German, an undertaking more momentous in its consequences than the boy dreamed of. The knowledge of German thus early acquired was soon of the utmost service in making him acquainted with the advance of biological investigation on the continent at a time when few indeed among English men of science were able to follow it at first hand, and turn the light of the newest theories upon their own researches.

It is therefore peculiarly interesting to note the cause which determined the young Huxley to take up the study of so little read a language. I have more than once heard him say that this was one half of the debt he owed to Carlyle, the other half being an intense hatred of shams of every sort and kind. The translations from the German, the constant references to German literature and philosophy, fired him to try the vast original from which these specimens were quarried, for the sake partly of the literature, but still more of the philosophy. The translation of "Wilhelm Meister," and some of the "Miscellaneous Essays" together, with "The French Revolution," were certainly among works of Carlyle with which he first made acquaintance, to be followed later by "Sartor Resartus," which for many years afterwards was his Enchiridion, as he puts it in an unpublished autobiographical fragment.

By great good fortune, a singularly interesting glimpse of my father's life from the age of fifteen onwards has been preserved in the shape of a fragmentary journal which he entitled, German fashion, "Thoughts and Doings." Begun on September 29, 1840, it is continued for a couple of years, and concludes with some vigorous annotations in 1845, when the little booklet emerged from a three years' oblivion at the bottom of an old desk. Early as this journal is, in it the boy displays three habits afterwards characteristic of the man: the habit of noting down any striking thought or saying he came across in the course of his reading; of speculating on the causes of things and discussing the right and wrong of existing institutions; and of making scientific experiments, using them to correct his theories.

The first entry, the heading, as it were, and keynote of all the rest, is a quotation from Novalis;--"Philosophy can bake no bread; but it can prove for us God, freedom, and immortality. Which, now, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?" The reference here given is to a German edition of Novalis, so that it seems highly probable that the boy had learnt enough of the language to translate a bit for himself, though, as appears from entries in 1841, he had still to master the grammar completely.

In science, he was much interested in electricity; he makes a galvanic battery] "in view of experiment to get crystallized carbon. Got it deposited, but not crystallized." [Other experiments and theorising upon them are recorded in the following year. Another entry showing the courage of youth, deserves mention:--]

October 5 (1840).--Began speculating on the cause of colours at sunset. Has any explanation of them ever been attempted? [which is supplemented by an extract] from old book.

[We may also remark the early note of Radicalism and resistance to anything savouring of injustice or oppression, together with the naive