6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



of family misfortune 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 in- 

 quiry I found that the unfortunate 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 me- 

 chanical 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 In- 

 stitute 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. 5 I am 

 now occasionally horrified to think how very little I 

 ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of heal- 

 ing. The only part of my professional course which 

 really and deeply interested me was physiology, which 

 is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and, 

 notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper 

 business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine 

 naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and 

 species work was always a burden to me; what I cared 

 for was the architectural and engineering part of the 

 business, the working out of the wonderful unity of 

 plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living 

 constructions, and the modifications of similar appar- 

 atuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attrac- 

 tion 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 four- 

 teen years of age when I was taken by some older 

 student friends of mine to the first post-mortem ex- 

 amination I ever attended. All my life I have been 

 most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables which 



5 "In the faction of the unfaithful." 



