a, saying
that he would consider such trespassing on holy ground as highly
irreverent.

He seemed never to be satisfied with the amount of work he had on
hand, and in 1872 he determined to add to his other labours by
studying anatomy and physiology. Professor Barclay Thompson supplied
him with a set of bones, and, having purchased the needful books, he
set to work in good earnest. His mind was first turned to acquiring
medical knowledge by his happening to be at hand when a man was seized
with an epileptic fit. He had prevented the poor creature from
falling, but was utterly at a loss what to do next. To be better
prepared on any future occasion, he bought a little manual called
"What to do in Emergencies." In later years he was constantly buying
medical and surgical works, and by the end of his life he had a
library of which no doctor need have been ashamed. There were only two
special bequests in his will, one of some small keepsakes to his
landlady at Eastbourne, Mrs. Dyer, and the other of his medical books
to my brother.

Whenever a new idea presented itself to his mind he used to make a
note of it; he even invented a system by which he could take notes in
the dark, if some happy thought or ingenious problem suggested itself
to him during a sleepless night. Like most men who systematically
overtax their brains, he was a poor sleeper. He would sometimes go
through a whole book of Euclid in bed; he was so familiar with the
bookwork that he could actually see the figures before him in the
dark, and did not confuse the letters, which is perhaps even more
remarkable.

Most of his ideas were ingenious, though many were entirely useless
from a practical point of view. For instance, he has an entry in his
Diary on November 8, 1872: "I wrote to Calverley, suggesting an idea
(which I think occurred to me yesterday) of guessing well-known poems
as acrostics, and making a collection of them to hoax the public."
Calverley's reply to this letter was as follows:--

My dear Sir,--I have been laid up (or laid down) for the
last few days by acute lumbago, or I would have written
before. It is rather absurd that I was on the point of
propounding to you this identical idea. I realised, and I
regret to add revealed to two girls, a fortnight ago, the
truth that all existing poems were in fact acrostics; and I
offered a small pecuniary reward to whichever would find out
Gray's "Elegy" within half an