man of six and twenty, in business at Hinckley.

I maintained that it could not be proved that matter is essentially, as to its base, different from soul. Mr. M. wittily said soul was the perspiration of matter.

We cannot find the absolute basis of matter; we only know it by its properties; neither know we the soul in any other way. Cogito ergo sum is the only thing that we certainly know.

Why may not soul and matter be of the same substance (i.e., basis whereon to fix qualities; for we cannot suppose a quality to exist per se, it must have a something to qualify), but with different qualities?

Hamilton's analysis of the Absolute, once learned, was never forgotten. It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the boy, applied by the man. With the Absolute, an entity stripped of perceptible qualities, an "hypostatized negation," he could have no traffic. The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put it, asserts that, philosophically speaking, materialism is but spiritualism turned inside out.

III

MEDICAL TRAINING

At fifteen and a-half he began his medical training. Engineering, it seems, was not within his parents' purview; the boy was thoughtful and scientific; medicine was then the only avenue for science, and medicine loomed large on their horizon, for two of their daughters had married doctors. Of these, Dr. Cooke had already begun to give him instruction in anatomy; it looked as though destiny had marked out his career.

In those days, the future doctor began by being apprenticed to a regular practitioner; he picked up a great deal from compounding medicines, watching out-patients in the surgery, and attending simple cases, especially if he had a capable man to work under. At the same time he prepared for his future examinations, and got ready to walk the hospitals.

This apprenticeship was a strongly formative period in Huxley's life. He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation: History ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, English Grammar, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, with German also and Physiology, besides experimental work in natural science, philosophical analysis, and a copious course of Carlyle.

But this book-work was the least of the influences acting upon him. Dr. Chandler had charge of the parish doctoring, and the boy's experiences among the poor in the dock region of the East End left an ineffaceable mark. It was a grim, living commentary on his Carlyle. For the rest of his life the cause of the poor appealed vividly to him, because he had at least seen something of the way in which the poor lived. People who were suffering from nothing but slow starvation would come to him for medical aid. One scene above all was burnt into his memory: a sick girl in a wretched garret, the boy visitor saying as gently as he could that her sole need was better food, and the sister of the starved child who turned upon him with a kind of choking passion, and, pulling from her pocket a few pence and half-pence and holding them out, cried: "That is all I get for six-and-thirty hours' work, and you talk about giving her proper food."

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.

No doubt his work was, as he confesses, not systematically spread over his various subjects; and his energy was fitful, though it was energy that struck his contemporaries, who gave the name of the "Sign of the Head and Microscope" to the familiar silhouette of him as he sat before a window poring over his dissections, while they swarmed out into the quadrangle after lectures.

He achieved brilliant successes as a student. In 1843 he won the first prize in Chemistry, with a note that his "extraordinary diligence and success in the pursuit of this branch of science do him infinite honour," as well as the first prize in Anatomy and Physiology. He was only twenty when, in 1845, he went up for his M.B. at London University, and won a gold medal in his favourite subjects of Anatomy and Physiology, being second in that section.

Early in 1846, being still too young to qualify at the College of Surgeons, yet confronted by the imperative necessity for earning his own bread, he applied, at the suggestion of his fellow-student,