666 JOHN FISKE. 



in a library in the family mansion, and to a great degree taught himself 

 much that is acquired with difficulty by persons of ordinary intellect 

 even when assisted by the best of masters. 



In his " Dutch and Quaker Colonies," Mr. Fiske says of James Logan : 

 ''He was an infant prodigy; at the age of twelve his attainments in 

 Greek, Latin, and Hebrew had attracted much notice, and he afterward 

 obtained distinction in modern languages, mathematics, physics, and 

 natural history." The story of Logan's precocity is fairly eclipsed by 

 Fiske's own record, but what he says of Logan shows us what his 

 dispassionate judgment was as to his own childhood career. Fiske's 

 biographers recapitulate his progress from year to year. It is needless 

 to give in full detail the story of his prodigious acquisitions. Suffice it 

 to say, that when six years old he began the study of Latin, and at the 

 age of seven he amused himself by reading Caesar, and found entertain- 

 ment in such authors as Rollins and Josephus, and in the perusal of 

 Goldsmith's Greece. The taste for history thus disclosed led him on to 

 the works of other authors, and before he was eleven years old he had 

 not only devoured many histories of divers peoples, but had from memory 

 filled a quarto blank-book of sixty pages with chronological tables of 

 events between 1000 15. C. and 1820 A. D. By the time he was thir- 

 teen lie had read the greater part of the writings of about a dozen Latin 

 authors, the work thus accomplished being in fact more than would be 

 required in that line of a graduate at Harvard. Meantime, mathematics 

 had not been neglected. Beginning with algebra at the age of eight, he 

 had, by the time he was thirteen, gone through Euclid, plane and spher- 

 ical trigonometry, surveying and navigation, and analytical geometry, 

 and had made a good start in differential calculus. 



Until he had mastered Latin sufficiently to make use of a Greek 

 lexicon in which the meanings were given in Latin, he could not take 

 up Greek, a lexicon of this description being the only one at his com- 

 mand. So trifling a discouragement as that did not long delay him. 

 As soon as he felt competent to make use of the means at hand, he 

 entered upon the study of Greek, and even before he obtained a modern 

 lexicon he made considerable progress in his knowledge of the language. 

 With the facility for study gained through the acquisition of a suitable 

 key to the meanings of the words, he reached such proficiency, at the 

 age of fifteen, that he could read Plato and Herodotus at sight. 



He began his philosophical studies at the age of eleven with Locke's 

 " Essay of the Understanding," and at fourteen himself wrote an essay 

 on the habitability of the planets, in which he made the point that 



