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 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 When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien.' 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 Ross-shire 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 more than twenty years later in the last days of his life. The essay was successful, and its author was more than once claimed as a champion of faith on the strength of it. It is a very hard bit of reading, and of course has to some extent the drawback of a prize essay, a work written not simply to convince the public, but to impress examiners. It is full of knowledge and of intellectual agility, but is perhaps needlessly difficult in style. His success was absolutely unexpected by his family, and made him very happy, as the following letters show, written in the first glow of success.