Huxley, about 1835,
returned to his native town of Coventry as manager of the Coventry
Savings Bank, while his daughters eked out the slender family
resources by keeping school.

Meantime, it does not seem that the boy Tom, as he was generally
called, received much regular instruction. On the other hand, he
learned a great deal for himself. 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. We catch a glimpse
of him at twelve, lighting his candle before dawn, and, with blanket
pinned round his shoulders, sitting up in bed to read Hutton's
_Geology_. We see him discussing all manner of questions with his
parents and friends; and, indeed, his eager and inquiring mind made it
possible for him to have friends considerably older than himself. One
of these was his brother-in-law, Dr. Cooke of Coventry, who married
his sister Ellen in 1839. Through Dr. Cooke he became, as a boy,
interested in human anatomy, with results that deeply affected his
career for good and for evil.

The extraordinary attraction [he writes] I felt towards the
intricacies of living structure proved nearly 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 o