Coventry, who had married his sister Ellen in 1839, and through whom he early became interested in human anatomy; and George Anderson May, at that time in business at Hinckley (a small weaving centre some dozen miles distant from Coventry), whom his friends who knew him afterwards in the home which he made for himself on the farm at Elford, near Tamworth, will remember for his genial spirit and native love of letters.  There was a real friendship between the two.  The boy of fifteen notes down with pleasure his visits to the man of six-and-twenty, with whom he could talk freely of the books he read, and the ideas he gathered about philosophy.

Afterwards, however, their ways lay far apart, and I believe they did not meet again until the seventies, when Mr. May sent his children to be educated in London, and his youngest son was at school with me; his younger daughter studied art at the Slade school with my sisters, and both found a warm welcome in the home circle at Marlborough Place.

One of his boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if their qualities were taken away; and lighting upon Sir William Hamilton’s “Logic,” he devoured it to such good effect that when, years afterwards, he came to tackle the greater philosophers, especially the English and the German, he found he had already a clear notion of where the key of metaphysic lay.

This early interest in metaphysics was another form of the intense curiosity to discover the motive principle of things, the why and how they act, that appeared in the boy’s love of engineering and of anatomy.  The unity of this motive and the accident which bade fair to ruin his life at the outset, and actually levied a lifelong tax upon his bodily vigour, are best told in his own words:—­]

As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but the fates were against this, and while very young I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother-in-law.  But, though the Institute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus infidelium.  I am now occasionally horrified to think how little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of healing.  The only part of my professional course which really and deeply interested me was physiology, which is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and, notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me.  I never collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business, the working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends.  The extraordinary attraction I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living structure nearly proved fatal to me at the