The Reminiscences of an Astronomer | Page 7

a young man who, while I was kneeling down during the
prayer, stood above me and squeezed my neck. He escaped with a
couple of severe though not serious cuts in his hand. He announced his
intention of thrashing me when we should meet again; so for several
days thereafter I tried, so far as possible, in going afield to keep a
pitchfork within reach, determined that if he tried the job and I failed to
kill him, it would be because I was unable to do so. Fortunately for
both of us he never made the attempt.
I read Combe's "Constitution of Man" when between ten and twelve
years of age. Though based on the ideas of phrenology and not, I
believe, of high repute as a system of philosophy, it was as good a
moral tonic as I can imagine to be placed in the hands of a youth,
however fallacious may have been its 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