AUTOBIOGRAPHY 5 



brought me my horse in a stable yard in Sydney that he was 

 my quondam antagonist. He had a long story of family mis- 

 fortune to account for his position, but at that time it was 

 necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in 

 New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that the unfor- 5 

 tunate young man had not only been "sent out," but had 

 undergone more than one colonial conviction. 



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 10 

 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 very little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the 15 

 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, notwith- 

 standing that natural science has been my proper business, I 

 am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. 20 

 I never collected anything, and species work was always a 

 burden to me ; what I cared for was the architectural and en- 

 gineering part of the business, the working out of the wonder- 

 ful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse 

 living constructions, and the modifications of similar appara- 25 

 tuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attraction I 

 felt towards the study of the intricacies of living structure 

 nearly proved fatal to me at the outset. I was a mere boy 

 I think between thirteen and fourteen years of age when I 

 was taken by some older student friends of mine to the first 30 

 post-mortem examination I ever attended. All my life I have 

 been most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables 

 which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my 

 curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two or 



