of disease.  Huxley, however, had only a short experience of this kind of training.  He was taken by some senior student friends to a post-mortem examination, and although then, as all through his life, he was most sensitive to the disagreeable side of anatomical pursuits, on this occasion he gratified his curiosity too ardently.  He did not cut himself, but in some way poisonous matter from the body affected him, and he fell into so bad a state of health that he had to be sent into the country to recruit.  He lived for some time at a farmhouse in Warwickshire with friends of his father and slowly recovered health.  From that time, however, all through his life, he suffered periodically from prostrating dyspepsia.  After some months devoted to promiscuous reading he resumed his work under his brother-in-law in London.  He confesses that he was far from a model student.

“I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did not,—­which was a frequent case,—­I was extremely idle (unless making caricatures of one’s pastors and masters is to be called a branch of industry), or else wasted my energies in wrong directions.  I read everything I could lay hands upon, including novels, and took up all sorts of pursuits to drop them again quite speedily.”

It is almost certain, however, that Huxley underestimated the value of this time.  He stored his mind with both literature and science, and laid the foundation of the extremely varied intellectual interests which afterwards proved to him of so much value.  It is certain, also, that during this time he acquired a fair knowledge of French and German.  It would be difficult to exaggerate the value to him of this addition to his weapons for attacking knowledge.  To do the best work in any scientific pursuit it is necessary to freshen one’s own mind by contact with the ideas and results of other workers.  As these workers are scattered over different countries it is necessary to transcend the confusion of Babel and read what they write in their own tongues.  When Huxley was young, the great reputation of Cuvier overshadowed English anatomy, and English anatomists did little more than seek in nature what Cuvier had taught them to find.  In Germany other men and other ideas were to be found.  Johannes Mueller and Von Baer were attacking the problems of nature in a spirit that was entirely different, and Huxley, by combining what he was taught in England with what he learned from German methods, came to his own investigations with a wider mind.  But his conquest of French and German brought with it advantages in addition to these technical gains.  There is no reason to believe that he troubled himself with grammatical details and with the study of these languages as subjects in themselves.  He acquired them simply to discover the new ideas concealed in them, and he by no means confined himself to the reading of foreign books on the subjects of his own studies.  He read French