MEMOIR 
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Laboratory and hold discussions on current topics such as 
the Darwinian question, and it was here that many of 
Spencer’s contemporaries, Sir W. Thorburn, Professor E. S. 
Reynolds, and other distinguished students of neurology and 
kindred subjects, were led to find their vocation. When 
Spencer gained a scholarship at Oxford it was regarded by 
all as a feather in the cap of Milnes Marshall, since it showed 
that he had raised biology to the same level as had been at¬ 
tained by chemistry under Roscoe, by physics under Balfour 
Steward, or by mathematics under Barker. After being 
elected Scholar at Exeter College in October 1880, he re¬ 
mained with Milnes Marshall until he went up to Oxford 
a year later, engaging during this interval in original research 
and winning the Dalton Prize in Natural History. Much of 
this information comes from his friend Professor J. G. 
Adami, late Principal of Liverpool University, who was at 
Owens College with him and studied biology in his company. 
For Spencer’s Oxford days I am able, thanks to the kind¬ 
ness of Mr. Howard Goulty, with whom he maintained a 
continuous correspondence, to draw freely on a series of 
vivid letters, every word of which is of interest, at any rate to 
an Oxford and Exeter man. In his very first letter from 
Oxford he writes, 'this is such a grand place’; though he 
goes on to hint that pain as well as pleasure attended his 
visit in the capacity of a scholarship-hunter: 
‘I never before felt so unfortunate, or so quite at sea in an exam. To 
begin with, the physics papers were horribly mathematical, and you 
know what that means. And then instead of biology we are having 
physiology, in which, to put it in a mild kind of way, my knowledge 
is not vast. . . . However, I had it out with the Examiner afterwards . . . 
I told him that I had come prepared to dissect creatures; and he asked 
me if I should like him to give me some dissection a proposal to 
which I readily assented.’ 
The Examiner in question was probably W. L. Morgan, 
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