Looking back [he says] on my "Lehrjahre," I am sorry to say that I do
not think that any account of my doings as a student would tend to
edification. In fact, I should distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid
imitating my example. I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and
when it did not, which was a very 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 as speedily. No doubt it
was very largely my own fault, but the only instruction from which I
obtained the proper effect of education was that which I received from
Mr. Wharton Jones, who was the lecturer on physiology at the Charing
Cross School of Medicine. The extent and precision of his knowledge
impressed me greatly, and the severe exactness of his method of
lecturing was quite to my taste. I do not know that I have ever felt so
much respect for anybody as a teacher before or since. I worked hard to
obtain his approbation, and 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. It was he who suggested the publication of my first
scientific paper--a very little one--in the "Medical Gazette" of 1845,
and most kindly corrected the literary faults which abounded in it,
short as it was; for at that time, and for many years afterwards, I
detested the trouble of writing, and would take no pains with it.

[He never forgot his debt to Wharton Jones, and years afterwards was
delighted at being able to do him a good turn, by helping to obtain a
pension for him. But although in retrospect he condemns the fitfulness
of his energies and his want of system, which left much to be learned
afterwards, which might with advantage have been learned then, still it
was his energy that struck his contemporaries. I have a story from one