MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
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Civil Service Commissioner ; Professor Wheatstone, later Sir Charles, who conjointly with Cooke was the introducer of the electric telegraph ; A. Smee the electrician, subsequently an authority on gardening, and others.
Professor Richard Partridge, F. R. S., familiarly called " Dickey," was brother to John Partridge, R.A., and Professor of Anatomy. It was commonly said that the brothers had each followed the occupation best fitted to the other. Certainly Richard Partridge was an admirable draughtsman, but was not, so, far as I was then capable of judging, a man who really loved and revelled in science. He delighted in minute points of human anatomy and did not generalise, consequently the information given in his lectures seemed to me as dry as the geography of Pinnock's Cntec.lhe4 , For all that, tliry were enlivened lby his never-failing humour. His instruction seemed to me deficient in the why and the wherefore. A human hand was just a human hand to him ; its analogies with paws, hoofs, wings, claws, and fins were never alluded to.
I spent a happy time under his roof. We pupils had the drawing-room to read and write in, with a wardrobe and a hanging closet tenanted by a jointed skeleton which we could study at will. The days were spent in the Medical Department of King's College, which was quite disconnected with the classical side. All the pupils entered at the same door, but there we separated. The medicals turned sharply to the right, and many of them went downstairs to the dissection room, where much of my own time was spent.
