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.

In this life-long recurrence of suffering he was like his great friend
and leader, Darwin. Each worked to his utmost under a severe handicap,
which, it must be remembered, in Darwin's case, was by far the
more constant and more disabling, though, happily, an ample fortune
absolved him from the troubles of pecuniary stress.

Years afterwards, one of these "good, kind friends" calls up the
picture of "Tom Huxley looking so thin and ill, and pretending to make
hay with one hand, while in the other he held a German book."

How did he come thus early to teach himself German, a study which was
to have undreamed-of consequences in his future? He learned it so well
that, while still a young man, he could read it--rare faculty--almost
as swiftly as English; and he was one of the swiftest readers I have
known. Thus equipped, he had the advantage of being one of the
few English men of science who made it a practice to follow German
research at first hand, and turn its light upon their own work.