HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN 3 



called to mind all of these things, especially when I 

 remembered that I had no fresh experiments to show, no 

 new discoveries to confide, and that I was terribly grown- 

 up, I almost made up my mind to write to the Managers 

 and refuse the honour of giving the Christmas Lectures. 



But one thought stopped me. Just at that time more 

 than a million human machines, all of them made in 

 Britain or in British colonies, were fighting grimly and 

 freely giving their lives in foreign lands that we and our 

 children might have homes and freedom. It was a serious 

 time then ; men and women were hungry for real know- 

 ledge, not fairy stories. So I thought : Why not tell them 

 something of the story of the human body — the human 

 machine ? Is it not the machine which you have been 

 labouring at and trying to understand for thirty years and 

 more ? Are you ashamed of the things you have been 

 teaching day after day to a succession of medical students ? 

 Will not boys and girls grow into wiser, perhaps happier, 

 men and women if they know about the machinery of their 

 own bodies ? When these thoughts passed through my 

 mind, I gladly accepted the invitation and resolved to give 

 the coming Christmas Lectures on the Human Machine. 



One great difficulty had to be got over. I could not 

 carry an actual human body to the Royal Institution and 

 take it to pieces before the happy children who gathered 

 there at Christmastide. I saw in my mind's eye the front 

 rows of the great amphitheatre filled with the radiant, 

 brightly lighted faces of boys and girls aged 10 or 12 ; 

 in the rows behind them their elder brothers and sisters 

 aged 15 and 16, and away on the higher tiers and 

 filling the upper galleries, the faces of men and women 

 who years before had occupied and enjoyed the front 

 rows of the amphitheatre. Clearly it was impossible 

 to do before such an audience what is done every 

 day in medical colleges. So with the help of some 

 of my assistants at the Royal College of Surgeons we 

 set to work, and out of coloured cardboard made a real 

 Goliath skeleton, one with all its bones truly shaped, 

 and with real joints, so that the skull could move on the 



