r School. I
took a little "elementary" prize in that in my first year and a medal
in my third; and in Chemistry and Human Physiology and Sound, Light
and Heat, I did well. There was also a lighter, more discursive
subject called Physiography, in which one ranged among the sciences
and encountered Geology as a process of evolution from Eozoon to Eastry
House, and Astronomy as a record of celestial movements of the most
austere and invariable integrity. I learnt out of badly-written,
condensed little text-books, and with the minimum of experiment, but
still I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt of
the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone as
a curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity. There was no
argon, no radium, no phagocytes--at least to my knowledge, and aluminium
was a dear, infrequent metal. The fastest ships in the world went then
at nineteen knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there ever thought
it possible that men might fly.

Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had of
Wimblehurst two years ago remarked no change whatever in its pleasant
tranquillity. They had not even built any fresh houses--at least not
actually in the town, though about the station there had been some
building. But it was a good place to do work in, for all its quiescence.
I was soon beyond the small requirements of the Pharmaceutical Society's
examination, and as they do not permit candidates to sit for that until
one and twenty, I was presently filling up my time and preventing my
studies becoming too desultory by making an attack upon the London
University degree of Bachelor of Science, which impressed me then as
a very splendid but almost impossible achievement. The degree
in mathematics and chemistry appealed to me as particularly
congenial--albeit giddily inaccessible. I set to work. I had presently
to arrange a holiday and go to London to matriculate, and so it was I
came upon my aunt and uncle again. In many ways that visit marked an
epoch. It was my first impression of London at all. I was then nineteen,
and by a conspiracy of chances my nearest approach to that human
wilderness had been my brief visit to Chatham. Chatham too had been my
largest town. So that I got London at last with an exceptional freshness
of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side to
life.

I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South E