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

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 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