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