He soon became an ardent sportsman and excellent shot, and rarely until his fatal illness began did he ever fail to keep the Twelfth of August and the First of September in the proper way. When George Romanes was about seventeen, he was sent to a tutor to read in preparation for the University, his mother having suddenly awakened to the fact that he was nearly grown up and not at all ready for college. One of his fellow pupils was Mr. Charles Edmund Lister, brother of the present owner of Shibden Hall, Halifax. With Mr. Lister he formed a friendship destined to be only broken by Mr. Lister's premature death in 1889. This friendship had important results for George Romanes. He had been intended for Oxford, and his name had been entered at Brasenose College, but Mr. Lister was to go to Cambridge, and he easily persuaded his friend to follow him. In October 1867 George John Romanes entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. CAMBRIDGE. 1867-1873 Most men feel that their University life is one of the most marked phases of their career. Even those who come up from a public school, with all the prestige and with all the friendships, the sense of fellowship, the hundred and one influences, the customs of a great school 'lying thick' upon them, realise more and more, as time goes on, how great a part Oxford or Cambridge plays in their lives; how it is in their University life they make their intellectual choice, and receive the bias which, for good or for evil, will influence their whole life. And to this raw boy, fresh from a secluded and somewhat narrow atmosphere, plunged for the first time into a great society, brought for the first time under some of the influences of the then Zeitgeist,' into contact with some of the leaders of thought, entrance into the University was the beginning of an entirely new life. He entered Cambridge, half-educated, utterly untrained, with no knowledge of men or of books. He left it, to all intents and purposes, a trained worker and earnest thinker, with his life work begun—that work which was an unwearied search after truth, a work characterised by an ever-increasing reverence for goodness, and, as years went on, by a disregard for applause or for reward. His Cambridge life was happy; he made several friends, chief of whom was Mr. Proby Cautley, the present rector of Quainton near Aylesbury. He enjoyed boating, and once narrowly escaped drowning in the Cam. At first George Romanes fell completely under Evangelical influences, at that time practically the most potent religious force in Cambridge. He was a regular communicant, and it is touching to look at the little Bible he used while at Cambridge, worn, and marked, and pencilled, with references to sermons which had evidently caught the boy's attention. He used to attend meetings for Greek Testament study, and enjoyed hearing the distinguished preachers who visited the University. But of the intellectual influences in the religious world of the University he knew nothing. F. D. Maurice was still in Cambridge, but he seems to have repelled rather than to have attracted George Ro manes, nor did he ever come under the influence of Westcott, or of Lightfoot, or of Hort. And, when the intellectual struggles began, he seems in early years to have owed very little to any Christian writer, Bishop Butler alone excepted. His summers were spent in Ross-shire, and there is no doubt these months were of great use to him. He was perfectly unharassed so far as pecuniary cares or family ambition were concerned, and he had abundant time to think. Years afterwards, Mr. Darwin said to him: 'Above all, Romanes, cultivate the habit of meditation,' and Mr. Romanes always quoted this as a most valuable bit of advice. His intellectual development was rapid in these Cambridge years, and it is not improbable that his slowly growing mind had not been ill served by being allowed to mature in absolute freedom, although he himself bitterly regretted and, through his whole life, deplored the lack of early training, and of mental discipline. Through these early Cambridge years he still cherished the idea of Holy Orders, and with his friend, Mr. Cautley, he had many talks about the career they both intended to choose. They spent a part of one long vacation together, and occupied themselves in reading theology-such books as Pearson on the Creed,' Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity,' Bishop Butler's Analogy,' and in writing sermons. Some of Mr. Romanes' are still extant, and are curious bits of boyish composition-crude, unformed in style, and yet full of thought, and showing a remarkable knowledge of the Bible. He seems to have been, for the rest, a bright, goodtempered, popular lad, always much chaffed for absentminded mistakes, for his long legs, for his peculiar name; and he certainly gave no one the faintest idea of any particular ability, any likelihood of future distinction. Some slight chance, as it seemed, turned his attention to natural science; one or two friends were reading for the Natural Science Tripos, and George Romanes ceased to read mathematics and began to work at natural science, competing for and winning a scholarship in that subject. Eighteen months only remained for him to work for his Tripos, and it is not surprising that he only obtained a Second Class. In the Tripos of 1870, in the same list among the First-Class men, Mr. Francis Darwin's name appears. Mr. Romanes had gone but a little distance along the road on which he was destined to travel very far. He had up to this time read none of Mr. Darwin's books, and to a question on Natural Selection which occurred in the Tripos papers he could give no answer. By this time he had abandoned the idea of Holy Orders, perhaps on account of the opposition at home, perhaps because of the first beginnings of the intellectual struggles of doubt and of bewilderment. He began to study medicine, and made a lifelong friendship with Dr. Latham, the well-known Cambridge physician, of whose kindness Mr. Romanes often spoke, and to whom he dedicated his first book, which was the Burney Prize for 1873. But he also began to study physiology under the direction of Dr. Michael Foster, the present Professor of Physiology at Cambridge, to whom she owes her famous medical school, at that time in its very early beginnings. Science entirely fascinated him; his first plunge 1 Mr. Cautley writes: 'I have never seen Romanes, under the greatest provocation, out of temper. Always gentle, always kind, never over, bearing never forgetful of friends.' into real scientific work opened to him a new life, gave him the first sense of power and of capacity. Now he read Mr. Darwin's books, and it is impossible to overrate the extraordinary effect they had on the young man's mind. Something of the feeling which Keats describes in the sonnet On Looking into Chapman's Homer' seems to have been his : 'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies About the spring of 1872 Mr. Romanes began to show signs of ill-health. He was harassed by faintness and incessant lassitude, but struggled on, going up to Scotland in the summer and beginning to shoot, under the belief that all he wanted was hard exercise. At last he broke down and was declared to be suffering from a bad attack of typhoid fever. He had a very hard struggle for life, and owed a great deal to Dr. Latham, who from Cambridge kept up a constant telegraphic communication with the Rossshire doctors. It was a long and weary convalescence, beguiled in part by writing an essay on 'Christian Prayer and General Laws,' the subject assigned for the Burney Prize Essay of 1873. Much of this essay was dictated to one or other of his sisters, and it is a curious fact that his first book and his last should have been on theological subjects. Both were written when he was struggling with great bodily weakness, and in these months of early manhood he showed the same almost pathetic desire to work, the same activity of thought which he displayed |