extent and precision of his knowledge impressed me greatly, and the severe exactness of his method of lecturing was quite to my taste.  I do not know that I have ever felt so much respect for anybody as a teacher before or since.  I worked hard to obtain his approbation, and 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.  It was he who suggested the publication of my first scientific paper—­a very little one—­in the “Medical Gazette” of 1845, and most kindly corrected the literary faults which abounded in it, short as it was; for at that time, and for many years afterwards, I detested the trouble of writing, and would take no pains with it.

[He never forgot his debt to Wharton Jones, and years afterwards was delighted at being able to do him a good turn, by helping to obtain a pension for him.  But although in retrospect he condemns the fitfulness of his energies and his want of system, which left much to be learned afterwards, which might with advantage have been learned then, still it was his energy that struck his contemporaries.  I have a story from one of them that when the other students used to go out into the court of the hospital after lectures were over, they would invariably catch sight of young Huxley’s dark head at a certain window bent over a microscope while they amused themselves outside.  The constant silhouette framed in the outlines of the window tickled the fancy of the young fellows, and a wag amongst them dubbed it with a name that stuck, “The Sign of the Head and Microscope.”

The scientific paper, too, which he mentions, was somewhat remarkable under the circumstances.  It is not given to every medical student to make an anatomical discovery, even a small one.  In this case the boy of nineteen, investigating things for himself, found a hitherto undiscovered membrane in the root of the human hair, which received the name of Huxley’s layer.

Speculations, too, such as had filled his mind in early boyhood, still haunted his thoughts.  In one of his letters from the “Rattlesnake,” he gives an account of how he was possessed in his student days by that problem which has beset so many a strong imagination, the problem of perpetual motion, and even sought an interview with Faraday, whom he left with the resolution to meet the great man some day on a more equal footing.]

March 1848.

To-day, ruminating over the manifold ins and outs of life in general, and my own in particular, it came into my head suddenly that I would write down my interview with Faraday—­how many years ago?  Aye, there’s the rub, for I have completely forgotten.  However, it must have been in either my first or second winter session at Charing Cross, and it was before Christmas I feel sure.

I remember how my long brooding perpetual motion scheme (which I had made more than one attempt to realise, but failed owing to insufficient mechanical dexterity) had been working upon me, depriving me of rest even, and heating my brain with chateaux d’Espagne of endless variety.  I remember, too, it was Sunday morning when I determined to put the questions, which neither my wits nor my hands would set at rest, into some hands for decision, and I determined to go before some tribunal from whence appeal should be absurd.