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 to 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.[3] 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.