Concerning his father, who was "one of the masters in a large semi-public school" (the father of Herbert Spencer, it will be remembered, was also a schoolmaster), Huxley has little to say in the slight autobiographical sketch reprinted as an introduction to the first volume of the Collected Essays. On that side, he tells us, he could find hardly any trace in himself, except a certain faculty for drawing, and a certain hotness of temper. "Physically and mentally," he was the son of his mother, "a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament." His school training was brief and profitless; his tastes were mechanical, and but for lack of means, he would have started life in the same profession which Herbert Spencer followed till he forsook Messrs. Fox's office for journalism. So, with a certain shrinking from anatomical work, Huxley studied medicine for a time under a relative, and in his seventeenth year entered the Charing Cross Hospital School as a student. In those days there was no instruction in physics, and only in such branch of chemistry as dealt with the nature of drugs. _Non multa, sed multum_, and what was lacking in breadth was, perhaps, gained in thoroughness. Huxley had as excellent a teacher in Wharton Jones as the latter had a promising pupil in Huxley, and in working with the microscope, the evidence of that came in his discovery of a certain root-sheath in the hair, which has since then been known as "Huxley's layer." Up to the time of his studentship, he had been left, intellectually, altogether to his own devices. He tells us that he was a voracious and omnivorous reader, "a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience." Among the books and essays that impressed him were Guizot's History of Civilization; and Sir William Hamilton's essay On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned which he accidentally came upon in an odd volume of the Edinburgh Review. This, he adds, was "devoured with avidity," and it stamped upon his mind the strong conviction "that on even the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable." Thus, before he was out of his teens, the philosophy that ruled his life-teaching was taking definite shape.