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exertion difficult, and my life altogether wearisome and uncomfortable. I continued to suffer -sometimes more, sometimes less-until the following autumn, when I went, accompanied by my friend Brande, for a short time to the seaside. It was remarkable how much, and what immediate refreshment this change of air and freedom of labour afforded me. I returned to London quite an altered person, and had only an occasional recurrence of my former symptoms during the following winter.

During the long war in which we were engaged, with only a brief intermission, from 1793 to 1815, we had little or no intercourse with scientific or professional men of other countries. On the conclusion of the war, however, several of our collaborateurs on the Continent visited this country, with some of whom I became well acquainted. Among these were Roux (who was at that time surgeon to the Hôpital de la Charité, and who afterwards succeeded to the same office in the Hôtel Dieu, and was for many years the principal surgeon of Paris), Orfila, and Magendie

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and then Ekstrom of Stockholm, Wagner, and others from Germany. There was a Milanese professor, Assalini, who had been with Napoleon in Egypt and Russia, was present at the burning of Moscow, and used to give us some curious details of what occurred in those expeditions. Dupuytren was here only once, and that some years afterwards, when he came to be present at a marriage in the Rothschild family. Among the men of science not immediately connected with the medical profession, those whom I knew best were Blainville and Berzelius. I saw Humboldt only on two occasions, once at Sir Joseph Bank's soirée, and once at the Royal Society. On the last occasion I walked back with him to the west end of the town from Somerset House, and I remember that he talked without intermission, displaying an immense store of knowledge, but passing from one subject to another, often without there seeming to be any very due connection between them. When I afterwards read that very remarkable, but rather unreadable production of his later years, 'Cosmos,' it reminded me very forcibly of the conversation

I had with him, or rather which he had with me, more than thirty years previously.

In what I am now writing I do not pretend to give an account of my domestic life; I must not, however, omit to notice the most important event belonging to it, and which must have exercised a great influence over my professional life also, which occurred in the year 1816. Serjeant Sellon, who had been a barrister of a good deal of repute, and well known to lawyers as the author of 'Sellon's Practice,' a work much valued by the legal profession, had been for some years a friend of my elder brother, and through him I became acquainted with the Serjeant's family. His third daughter and myself became much attached to each other; and in the spring of the year above mentioned she became my wife. She was nineteen years of age, and I had not quite completed my thirty-third year. At the time at which I am now writing (1855), we have been married nearly thirty-nine years, and our affection for each other has remained unaltered. She has been an excellent wife to myself, and an

excellent mother to our three surviving children. That they have turned out such worthy members of society, and have been a source of so much happiness to ourselves, is to be attributed mainly to the trouble which she took from the very earliest period of their lives in training their moral character, at a time when I was too much engaged in my professional duties to be able to pay the necessary degree of attention to them myself. What has occurred in my own family confirms the opinion which I might, indeed, have been led to form from what I have seen elsewhere, that the characters of individuals depend much more on the mother than on the father, the mother having the chief management of them during childhood, when the mind is more pliant, and when permanent habits are more easily established than is the case in after years.

It may be worth while to mention that, in the year of my marriage, my professional income, derived from professional fees and lectures, amounted to 1,5307. I had previously saved sufficient money to re-furnish and paint my house, and in other ways make it more fit than

it had been before for the reception of a bride. I now, for the first time, had a carriage and a pair of horses. In other respects, we made very little addition to my former establishment. As my wife had no fortune given her at the time of our marriage, nor indeed any except what had been settled on her after her father's and mother's deaths, and as my profession entailed some expenses on us, we were under the necessity of being careful as to our mode of living. My dear wife had no expensive habits, and we managed to make both ends meet at the end of the year. Still, I cannot but say that this was a period of considerable anxiety, when I felt for the first time that another individual as well as myself, and probably children hereafter, had to depend, not only on my professional character, but also on my bodily health. Fortunately, in the beginning of the following year there was a more manifest increase of my practice than there had ever been before. This kept my anxiety within bounds; still it was considerable, and was probably the cause of my having some return of the dyspeptic symptoms under which I

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