390 WILLIAM FERREL. 



dent to ask his father for money with which to buy books, — too diffi- 

 dent even to confess his wish for books ; but he worked in harvest 

 time, and earned enough money to buy Park's Arithmetic, in which he 

 learned something of mensuration. He continued to buy all the books 

 he could afford, a very few, and studied them most diligently. In 

 winter evenings he had only firelight to read by, or sometimes a pale 

 tallow candle ; in the summer, he would study while at work in the 

 barn, attacking and solving all the problems that the books supplied. 

 This plain living on his father's farm was not unlike that of thousands 

 of other boys ; but his unquenchable thirst for knowledge carried him 

 out of the narrow surroundings in which his neighbors remained. We 

 must always sympathize with the difficulties under which Ferrel strug- 

 gled in his youth, and at first thought we should wish he might have 

 had an easier life ; but who can say whether the lessons of successful 

 endeavor against all obstacles were not essential for his later develop- 

 ment as an original investigator ? His isolation turned him towards 

 original methods of thought ; and this originality and independence 

 mark all his later work. The few distractions in his early life must 

 have allowed the development of the perseverance with which he 

 worked upon anything that took his attention, never giving it up until 

 he could make some advance in it, or until he satisfied himself that he 

 could not do so. 



At the age of twenty years, having earned some money by teaching 

 near home, he weut to Marshall College, at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. 

 On exhausting his funds, he went home again and taught for two years 

 more, then going to Bethany College in Virginia, where he was gradu- 

 ated in 1844. This closed his education as far as instruction from 

 others was concerned, at the age of twenty-seven. For the next four- 

 teen years he taught school, mostly in villages in Missouri, Kentucky, 

 and Tennessee. It must be of these lonesome years that he speaks in 

 the closing paragraph of his autobiography : " Much of my time has 

 been wasted, especially the earlier part of it, because, not having sci- 

 entific books and scientific associations, I had often nothing on hand in 

 which I was specially interested." 



Yet it was in these lonesome years that Ferrel had the good fortune 

 of finding a copy of Newton's " Principia" in the hands of a village 

 storekeeper in Missouri. While in Kentucky, he sent to Philadelphia 

 for Laplace's " Mecanique Celeste " ; and when in Nashville, he came 

 upon Airy's Essays on the " Figure of the Earth," and on "Tides and 

 Waves." Living alone with these great leaders, he carried their work 

 on further, and made his own impress on the study of the ocean and 

 the atmosphere. 



