54 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ries was one of the education of the family of a Herr Gutrnan, a work 

 apparently of a kind with our English " Sandford and Merton," with 

 which the youth was so charmed that, not doubting its reality, he 

 made earnest efforts to become acquainted with the children, sending 

 letters to his friends in other places in hopes that they might be able 

 to forward them to the proper addresses. Pastor Wyss's " Swiss 

 Family Robinson " fell into his hands and awakened in him an intense 

 interest in natural history. He tried, as nearly as circumstances would 

 allow, to repeat the adventures and exploits of the four sprightly youths 

 of this story. He had no buffaloes, and jackals, and ostriches to sub- 

 due and train ; but he could catch and tame magpies, and hawks, and 

 marmots, and foxes. His experiments were not always fortunate, but 

 he learned. A letter which he wrote to his cousin is interesting as 

 showing how much he admired his " Robinson," and as marking the 

 progress he was making in the study of the ancient- languages, by the 

 comical mixture of German and Latin words in which it is composed. 

 Four years later, in 1823, he was beginning fractions, had finished the 

 Latin Grammar, and was interlarding his letters with French phrases. 

 A few months later these gave way to attempts at the Greek charac- 

 ters, and he was learning to draw ; for on the 1st of December he 

 wrote, " To-day I finished my head." It is remarked of this period by 

 his brother, Pastor Justus Heer, that he who afterward exhibited such 

 great powers of memory learned his classical vocabularies and inflec- 

 tions only with the greatest labor, and, being chided by his father for 

 his dullness, got up at four o'clock in the morning to give himself 

 more time for the drill. He afterward added Hebrew to his linguistic 

 acquirements, and gave himself object-lessons in mathematics by cal- 

 culating the areas of familiar objects, taking the levels of the new 

 road, and measuring the heights of the neighboring mountains. " Once 

 upon a time " one of the papers containing some of his calculations 

 was carried away by a gust of wind, and was supposed to be lost ; 

 but it was returned a few days afterward by a mountaineer, who said, 

 " Here is a letter that came down from the sky, and must belong to 

 the parsonage." 



The enthusiasm awakened in him by the example of the Robinson 

 boys was permanent, and was manifested in the interest he took in 

 everything living. He attended to the milking of the goats, took 

 upon himself the care of the bees and their swarms, and had collec- 

 tions of beetles and butterflies as early as 1822 or 1823. He was 

 anxious to identify and classify his specimens, but on this subject his 

 father could give him but little information and no scientific aid. He 

 became acquainted with choir-director J. J. Blumer, of Glarus, who 

 was the owner of a small collection in natural history and a few scien- 

 tific books, and borrowed from him, October 4, 1823, Wilhelmi's "De- 

 scription of Insects." The question now was how to make this treasure 

 his own. His father advised him to copy out the most important parts 



