When, after a full year, he left Rotherhithe for the north of London, to be apprenticed—­as his elder brother, James, had already been apprenticed—­to his other medical brother-in-law, Dr. Scott, he saw more of this teeming, squalid life in the filthy courts and alleys through which he used to pass on his way to the library of the College of Surgeons.

What, in later life, he tried to do to better this state of things was not the usual philanthropic work, but the endeavour to bring intellectual light to the ignorant toilers, to strip away make-believe, and provide some machinery by which to catch and utilize capacity.

Great was the change from the surroundings of Rotherhithe to the home atmosphere of the Scotts.  He was now with his favourite sister Eliza, his senior by twelve years, who was a second mother to him.  Her sympathy and encouragement did much for him; her belief in the future of “her boy” was redoubled upon his first public success when, at the age of seventeen, he won the second prize, the silver medal of the Apothecaries’ Company, in a competitive examination in botany.  “For a young hand,” he tells us, “I worked really hard from eight or nine in the morning until twelve at night, besides a long, hot summer’s walk over to Chelsea, two or three times a week, to hear Lindley.  A great part of the time—­i.e., June and July—­I worked till sunrise.  The result was a sort of ophthalmia, which kept me from reading at night for months afterwards.”

The lively and amusing description of the examination and its sequel is given in full in the Life; suffice it to say that when four o’clock came and only two competitors were left writing hard, and not half through the paper, they were allowed to go on by general consent.  By eight o’clock the seventeen-year-old came to an end; the older man went on until nine.  This was John Ellerton Stocks, afterwards M.D. and a distinguished traveller and botanist in India.  To him fell the first prize; the boy, to his own astonishment and the wild delight of his sister, won the second.

In October, 1812, a couple of months after this success, both he and his brother James entered Charing Cross Hospital as free scholars.  Here he worked very hard—­when it pleased him—­took up all sorts of pursuits and dropped them again, and read everything he could lay hands upon, including novels.  The one instructor by whom he was really impressed, and for whom he did his utmost, was Wharton Jones, lecturer on physiology.  “He was extremely kind and helpful to the youngster, who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any right to do.”  Wharton Jones assuredly was one of those born teachers who love to give time and all to a keen and promising pupil.  It is good to know that the bread he cast upon the waters returned to him after many days.  Wharton Jones, too, was responsible for the publication of the young man’s first scientific paper, in the Medical Gazette of 1845.  Investigating things for himself, the student of nineteen had found a hitherto undiscovered membrane in the root of the human hair, which received the name of Huxley’s layer.