192 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



translation into very good English, — exceedingly well printed, and 

 accompanied with notes appended to each page which leave no step 

 in the text, of moment, unsupplied, and hardly any material difficulty 

 of conception or reasoning unelucidated." Referring to the continu- 

 ance of the work, the writer adds : " Should this unfortunately not 

 be the case, we shall deeply lament that the liberal offer of the Ameri- 

 can Academy of Arts and Sciences to print the whole at their expense, 

 was not accepted.." * 



In 1838, after three volumes of the translation and commentary 

 had been published, a writer in the London Athenseum expresses 

 himself in these words : " Dr. Bowditch rose, like Fninkliu, from 

 bumble life, and had much to struggle with, and did struggle man- 

 fully, and did succeed. He was, in other words, an illustrious instance 

 of a self-educitted mati. . . . No matter what a man's facilities may 

 be, without this (the possession and use of the appropriating and in- 

 corporating power) he can never be educated, any more than he can 

 be healthy without sound bodily organs. 



" The lack of facilities is not, however, to be spoken of lightly, 

 though it must not be confounded, nor yet compared, with the lack 

 of the power that uses them: nor must it be supposed that such a 

 thing as an absolute lack of facilities can exist. Nature herself has 

 provided facilities, food for education, materials for self-making 

 men to rise up, in times and places when and where no other facilities 

 may be had. She opens the great school-room of creation for them. 

 She gives them homes, society, the world at large. Above all, 

 she gives them eyes to see, and ears to hear, and an all-availing and 

 available spirit within them : the intellectual, immortal instinct, the 

 thirst for knowledge, and the faculty of finding it, in earth, and air, 

 and sea. No loads of appliances can surfeit such a mind on the one 

 hand : no lack of them can starve it on the other. 



" Let us not be supposed, then, to use the words as abusing them, 

 when we call Dr. Bowditch an illustrious instance of a self-educated 

 man. He was, in other words, as we understand it, an educated 

 man : his intellect informed and trained, his character seasoned and 

 consummated, and this under those circumstances of extraordinary 

 self-dependence, which, it is well known, are so admirably suited to 

 bring out and give their finest play to minds of a high order, on the 

 very same principle that they prove fatal to weaker ones. . . . 



" Dr. Bowditch's great scientific work — the one on which his 



* Quarterly Review, vol. xlvii., 1832, pp. 558, 559. 



