y of our pranks played in our parents' absence.
The only remaining memory of that visit was that the old doctor
brought down from one of his shelves a large jar, out of which he
produced a pickled human brain. I was thrilled with entirely new
emotions. I had never thought of man's body as a machine. That this
weird, white, puckered-up mass could be the producer or transmitter of
all that made man, that it controlled our physical strength and
growth, and our responses to life, that it made one into "Mad G." and
another into me--why, it was absolutely marvellous. It attracted me as
did the gramophone, the camera, the automobile.

My father saw at once on my return that I had found my real interest,
and put before me two alternative plans, one to go to Oxford, where my
brother had just entered, or to join him in London and take up work in
the London Hospital and University, preparatory to going in for
medicine. I chose the latter at once--a decision I have never
regretted. I ought to say that business as a career was not suggested.
In England, especially in those days, these things were more or less
hereditary. My forbears were all fighters or educators, except for an
occasional statesman or banker. Probably there is some advantage in
this plan.

The school had been leased for a period of seven years to a very
delightful successor, it being rightly supposed that after that time
my brother would wish to assume the responsibility.

Some of the subjects for the London matriculation were quite new to
me, especially "English." But with the fresh incentive and new vision
of responsibility I set to work with a will, and soon had mastered the
ten required subjects sufficiently to pass the examination with
credit. But I must say here that Professor Huxley's criticisms of
English public school teaching of that period were none too stringent.
I wish with all my heart that others had spoken out as bravely, for in
those days that wonderful man was held up to our scorn as an atheist
and iconoclast. He was, however, perfectly right. We spent years of
life and heaps of money on our education, and came out knowing nothing
to fit us for life, except that which we picked up incidentally.

I now followed my father to London, and found every subject except my
chemistry entirely new. I was not familiar with one word of botany,
zoology, physics, physiology, or comparative anatomy. About the
universe which I inhabited I knew as little as I di