achines; 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 farm-yard 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.

Looking back on my "Lehrjahre," I am sorry to say that I do not think
that any account of my doings as a student would tend to edification. In
fact, I should distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imitating my
example. I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did
not--which was a very frequent case--I was extremely idle (unless making
caricatures of one's pastors and masters is to be called a branch of
industry), or else wasted my energies in wrong directions. I read
everything I could lay hands upon, including novels, and took up