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.

In this life-long recurrence of suffering he was like his great friend and leader, Darwin.  Each worked to his utmost under a severe handicap, which, it must be remembered, in Darwin’s case, was by far the more constant and more disabling, though, happily, an ample fortune absolved him from the troubles of pecuniary stress.

Years afterwards, one of these “good, kind friends” calls up the picture of “Tom Huxley looking so thin and ill, and pretending to make hay with one hand, while in the other he held a German book.”

How did he come thus early to teach himself German, a study which was to have undreamed-of consequences in his future?  He learned it so well that, while still a young man, he could read it—­rare faculty—­almost as swiftly as English; and he was one of the swiftest readers I have known.  Thus equipped, he had the advantage of being one of the few English men of science who made it a practice to follow German research at first hand, and turn its light upon their own work.

The learning of German was one half of the debt he owed to Carlyle, the other being an intense hatred of shams of every sort and kind.  He had begun to read the fiery-tongued prophet in his earliest teens, and caught his inspiration at once. Sartor Resartus was for many years his Enchiridion (he says), while the translations from the German, the references to German literature and philosophy, fired him to read the originals.

As to other languages, his testimonials in 1842 record that he reads French with facility, and has a fair knowledge of Latin.  Thus he took the Suites a Buffon with him on the Rattlesnake as a reference book in zoology.  As to Latin, he was not content with a knowledge of its use in natural science.  Beyond the minimum knowledge needful to interpret, or to confer, the “barbarous binomials” of scientific nomenclature, he was led on to read early scientific works published in Latin; and in philosophy, something of Spinoza; and later, massive