The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 1 | Page 6

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 outset. I was a mere boy--I think between thirteen and fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older student friends of mine to the first post-mortem examination I ever attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my curiosity overpowered 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.
[Some little time after his return from the voyage of the "Rattlesnake," Huxley succeeded in tracing his good Warwickshire friends again. A letter of May 11, 1852, from one of them, Miss K. Jaggard, tells how they had lost sight of the Huxleys after their departure from Coventry; how they were themselves dispersed by death, marriage, or retirement; and then proceeds to draw a lively sketch of the long delicate-looking lad, which clearly refers to this period or a little later.]
My brother and sister who were living at Grove Fields when you visited there, have now retired from the cares of business, and are living very comfortably at Leamington...I suppose you remember Mr. Joseph Russell, who used to live at Avon Dassett. He is now married and gone to live at Grove Fields, so that it is still occupied by a person of the same name as when you knew it. But it is very much altered in appearance since the time when such merry and joyous parties of aunts and cousins used to assemble there. I assure you we have often talked of "Tom Huxley" (who was sometimes one of the party) looking so thin and ill, and pretending to make hay with one hand, while in the other he held a German book! Do you remember it? And the picnic at Scar Bank? And how often too your patience was put to the test in looking for your German books which had been hidden by some of those playful companions who were rather less inclined for learning than yourself?
[It is interesting to see from this letter and from a journal, to be quoted hereafter, that he had thus early begun to teach himself German, an undertaking more momentous in its consequences than the boy dreamed of. The knowledge of German thus early acquired was soon of the utmost service in making him acquainted with the advance of biological investigation on the continent at a time when few indeed among English men of science were able to follow it at first hand, and turn the light of the newest theories upon their own researches.
It is therefore peculiarly interesting to note the cause which determined the young Huxley to take up the study of so little read a language. I have more than once heard him say that this was one half of the debt he owed to Carlyle, the other half being an intense hatred of shams of