Already in his undergraduate days Newton (as his friend and contemporary, John Ruskin, tells in "Præterita") was giving evidence of his natural bent; the scientific study of classical archaeology, which Winckelmann had set on foot in Germany, was in England to find its worthy apostle in Newton. In 1840, contrary to the wishes of his family, he entered the British Museum as an assistant in the department of antiquities. As a career the museum, as it then was, can have presented but few attractions to a young man; but the department, as yet undivided, probably offered to Newton a wider range of comparative study in his subject than he could otherwise have acquired.