general doctrines. So far as I can recall, it taught that all individual and social ills were due to men's disregard of the laws of Nature, which were classified as physical and moral. Obey the laws of health and we and our posterity will all reach the age of one hundred years. Obey the moral law and social evils will disappear. Its reading was accompanied by some qualms of conscience, arising from the non-accordance of many of its tenets with those of the "Catechism" and the "New England Primer." The combination of the two, however, led to the optimistic feeling that all wrongs would be righted, every act of injustice punished, and truth and righteousness eventually triumph through the regular processes of Nature and Society. I have been led to abandon this doctrine only by much experience, some of which will be found in the following pages.

In the direction of mathematical and physical science and reading generally, I may add something to what I have quoted from my father. My grandfather Simon had a small collection of books in the family. Among those purely literary were several volumes of "The Spectator" and "Roderick Random." Of the former I read a good deal. The latter was a story which a boy who had scarcely read any other would naturally follow with interest. Two circumstances connected with the reading, one negative and the other positive, I recall. Looking into the book after attaining years of maturity, I found it to contain many incidents of a character that would not be admitted into a modern work. Yet I read it through without ever noticing or retaining any impression of the indelicate side of the story. The other impression was a feeling of horror that a man fighting a duel and finding himself, as he supposed, mortally wounded by his opponent, should occupy his mind with avenging his own death instead of making his peace with Heaven.

Three mathematical books were in the collection, Hammond's Algebra, Simpson's Euclid, and Moore's Navigator, the latter the predecessor of Bowditch. The first was a miserable book, and I think its methods, which were crude in the extreme, though not incorrect, were rather more harmful than beneficial. The queer diagrams in Euclid had in my early years so little attraction for me that my curiosity never led me to examine its text. I at length did so in consequence of a passage in the algebra which referred to the 47th proposition of the First Book. It occurred to me to look into the book and see what this was. It was the first conception of mathematical proof that I had ever met with. I saw that the demonstration referred to a previous proposition, went back to that, and so on to the beginning. A new world of thought seemed to be opened. That principles so profound should be reached by methods so simple was astonishing. I was so enraptured that I explained to my brother Thomas while walking out of doors one day how the Pythagorean proposition, as it is now called, could be proved from first principles, drawing the necessary diagrams with a pencil on a piece of wood. I thought that even cattle might understand geometry could they only be communicated with and made to pay attention to it.

Some one at school had a copy of Mrs. Marcet's "Conversations on Natural Philosophy." With this book I was equally enraptured. Meagre and even erroneous though it was, it presented in a pleasing manner the first principles of physical science. I used to steal into the schoolhouse after hours to read a copy of the book, which belonged to one of the scholars, and literally devoured it in a few evenings.

My first undertaking in the way of scientific experiment was in the field of economics and psychology. When about fourteen I spent the winter in the house of an old farmer named Jefferson. He and his wife were a very kindly couple and took much interest in me. He was fond of his pipe, as most old farmers are. I questioned whether anything else would not do just as well as tobacco to smoke, and whether he was not wasting his money by buying that article when a cheap substitute could be found. So one day I took his pipe, removed the remains of the tobacco ashes, and stuffed the pipe with tea leaves that had been steeped, and which in color and general appearance looked much like tobacco. I took care to be around when he should again smoke. He lit the pipe as usual and smoked it with, seemingly, as much satisfaction as ever, only essaying the remark, "This tobacco tastes like tea." My conscience pricked me, but I could say nothing.

My father bought a copy of Lardner's "Popular Lectures on Science and Art." In this I first read of electricity. I recall an incident growing out of it. In Lardner's description of a Leyden jar, water is the only internal conductor. The wonders of the newly invented telegraph were then explained to the people in out of the way places by traveling lecturers. One of these came to Clements, where we then lived, with a lot of apparatus, amongst which was what I recognized as a Leyden jar. It was coated with tin-foil on the outside, but I did not see the inner coating, or anything which could serve as the necessary conductor. So with great diffidence I asked the lecturer while he was arranging his things, if he was not going to put water into the jar.

"No, my lad," was his reply, "I put lightning into it."

I wondered how the "lightning" was going to be conveyed to the interior surface of the glass without any conductor, such as water, but was too much abashed to ask the question.

Moore's "Navigator" taught not only a very crude sort of trigonometry, but a good deal about the warship of his time. To a boy living on the seacoast, who naturally thought a ship of war one of the greatest works of man, the book was of much interest.

Notwithstanding the intellectual pleasure which I have described, my boyhood was on the whole one of sadness. Occasionally my love of books brought a word of commendation from some visitor, perhaps a Methodist minister, who patted me on the head with a word of praise. Otherwise it caused only exclamations of wonder which were distasteful.

"You would n't believe what larnin' that boy has got. He has more larnin' than all the people around here put together," I heard one farmer say to another, looking at me, in my own view of the case, as if I were some monster misshapen in the womb. Instead of feeling that my bookish taste was something to be valued, I looked upon myself as a lusus naturæ whom Nature had cruelly formed to suffer from an abnormal constitution, and lamented that somehow I never could be like other boys.

The maladroitness described by my father, of which I was fully conscious, added to the feeling of my unfitness for the world around me. The skill required on a farm was above my reach, where efficiency in driving oxen was one of the most valued of accomplishments. I keenly felt my inability to acquire even respectable mediocrity in this branch of the agricultural profession. It was mortifying to watch the dexterous motions of the whip and listen to the torrent of imperatives with which a young farmer would set a team of these stolid animals in motion after they had failed to respond to my gentle requests, though conveyed in the best of ox language.

I had indeed gradually formed, from reading, a vague conception of a different kind of world,—a world of light,—where dwelt men who wrote books and people who knew the men who wrote books,—where lived boys who went to college and devoted themselves to learning, instead of driving oxen. I longed much to get into this world, but no possibility of doing so presented itself. I had no idea that it would be imbued with sympathy for a boy outside of it who wanted to learn. True, I had once read in some story, perhaps fictitious, how a nobleman had found a boy reading Newton's "Principia," and not only expressed his