392 CYRUS MOORS WARREN. 



tive ability, he was none the less attracted instinctively by things high 

 and excellent, and he sought faithfully, according to his lights, for the 

 best which the world has to give. In his early years he devoted 

 himself with untiring energy to the accumulation of property ; but in 

 middle life he gave himself up to the service of science with the same 

 zealous ardor and with distinguished success. It then appeared that 

 he cared for money only as a means to worthy ends, for he was liberal 

 almost to a fault, and it was especially noticeable that he never shrank 

 from expense when it appeared that by freely employing money some 

 obscure point in science might be made clear. To his friends he was a 

 constant reminder of the truth of the Old World dictum, " L'Ameri- 

 cain ne se redoute a rien," and his work may well be regarded as a 

 symbol of great things which will come to be when Americans such as 

 he was shall more commonly than now happens give themselves up as 

 he did to scientific pursuits. 



This type is distinctively a product of our Western States. Many 

 people at the East have no just conception of it. It was said indeed 

 by a Boston lady who had been accustomed all her life to the society 

 and the admiration of men wealthy, artistic, literary, and scientilic, 

 that she had never met or seen in her experience any such person as 

 Mr. James's hero. But it was an easy matter to prove that she had 

 not looked in the right place, even as Thoreau made answer to the 

 seeker of arrow-heads by stooping to pick one up from the road on 

 which they were walking. 



Cyrus was the fifth son and the eighth child in the family of 

 eleven children of Jesse and Betsey (Jackson) Warren, who came of 

 old Massachusetts stock, of English origin, related in fact to the War- 

 rens and Jacksons whose names have so constantly been conspicuous 

 in the history of this State. Both of them belonged to well defined 

 branches of the original stocks. Jesse Warren, the father, a man of 

 decided ingenuity, was a blacksmith, who employed many men and 

 carried on establishments which must have been large for those days. 

 He became at length a manufacturer of ploughs also, which were 

 esteemed in their time. He invented the so called swivel, or side-hill 

 plough, and was, if not the first, among the first of New Engkmders to 

 make the working parts of ploughs of cast iron. Not having been 

 pecuniarily very successful at Dedham, the elder Warren bought a farm 

 at Peru, Bennington County, Vermont, in the very heart of the forests 

 of the Green Mountains, and established also a foundry, plough-shop, 

 and smithy there, in 1829, when the boy Cyrus was five years old. 

 The wildness of the place may be conceived of from the facts that one 



