Afterwards, however, their ways lay far apart, and I believe they did
not meet again until the seventies, when Mr. May sent his children to be
educated in London, and his youngest son was at school with me; his
younger daughter studied art at the Slade school with my sisters, and
both found a warm welcome in the home circle at Marlborough Place.

One of his boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if
their qualities were taken away; and lighting upon Sir William
Hamilton's "Logic," he devoured it to such good effect that when, years
afterwards, he came to tackle the greater 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,