But of the intellectual influences in the religious world of the University he knew nothing. F. D. Maurice was still in Cambridge, but he seems to have repelled rather than to have attracted George Romanes, nor did he ever come under the influence of Westcott, or of Lightfoot, or of Hort.
And, when the intellectual struggles began, he seems in early years to have owed very little to any Christian writer, Bishop Butler alone excepted.
His summers were spent in Ross-shire, and there is no doubt these months were of great use to him. He was perfectly unharassed so far as pecuniary cares or family ambition were concerned, and he had abundant time to think. Years afterwards, Mr. Darwin said to him: 'Above all, Romanes, cultivate the habit of meditation,' and Mr. Romanes always quoted this as a most valuable bit of advice. His intellectual development was rapid in these Cambridge years, and it is not improbable that his slowly growing mind had not been ill served by being allowed to mature in absolute freedom, although he himself bitterly regretted and, through his whole life, deplored the lack of early training, and of mental discipline.
Through these early Cambridge years he still cherished the idea of Holy Orders, and with his friend, Mr. Cautley, he had many talks about the career they both intended to choose. They spent a part of one long vacation together, and occupied themselves in reading theology—such books as 'Pearson on the Creed,' Hooker's 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' Bishop Butler's 'Analogy,' and in writing sermons. Some of Mr. Romanes' are still extant, and are curious bits of boyish composition—crude, unformed in style, and yet full of thought, and showing a remarkable knowledge of the Bible.
He seems to have been, for the rest, a bright, good-tempered, popular lad, always much chaffed for absent-minded mistakes, for his long legs, for his peculiar name; and he certainly gave no one the faintest idea of any particular ability, any likelihood of future distinction.[4] Some slight chance, as it seemed, turned his attention to natural science; one or two friends were reading for the Natural Science Tripos, and George Romanes ceased to read mathematics and began to work at natural science, competing for and winning a scholarship in that subject.
Eighteen months only remained for him to work for his Tripos, and it is not surprising that he only obtained a Second Class. In the Tripos of 1870, in the same list among the First-Class men, Mr. Francis Darwin's name appears.
Mr. Romanes had gone but a little distance along the road on which he was destined to travel very far. He had up to this time read none of Mr. Darwin's books, and to a question on Natural Selection which occurred in the Tripos papers he could give no answer.
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