To Edwin there was nothing intrinsically romantic in Chemistry or Physics. His mind could not conceive that science was a minute and infinitely laborious conquest of the properties of matter. Atoms and Molecules and the newly-dreamed Electrons, still trembling in the realms of imponderable speculation, were no more to him than abstractions unrelated to the needs of practical human life. They were only facts to be learned by rote, symbols to be memorised and grouped together on paper like the letters in an algebraic calculation; and the whole of this potentially romantic experience was clouded by his own headachy distaste for the gaseous smells of the laboratory: the choking yellow fumes of chlorine that escaped from the glass cupboards in which it was manufactured, and the less tolerable, if more human, odour of Sulphuretted Hydrogen, in an air that was desiccated by the blue flames of half a hundred Bunsen burners. These two subjects were nothing more than an arid desert of facts relating to dead matter through which he had to fight his way, and he hated them. In comparison with them, Biology was something of an oasis. Here, at any rate, he had to deal with life, a mystery more obvious and less academic. The contemplation of its lower forms, such as the Amoeba, a tiny speck of dreamy protoplasm stretching out its languid tentacles, living its remote and curiously detached life with no aims beyond that of bare mysterious existence, filled him with a strange awe. The laboratory in which these researches were conducted, was high and airy and not associated with any unpleasant smells except at the season when the class were engaged upon the dissection of the hideous dog-fish. It had even its aspects of beauty in the person of the fair American in her dark overall; and for this reason, if for no other, Edwin found himself becoming most proficient in his knowledge of the subject.