508 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



ARTHUR SEARLE (1837-1920). 



Fellow in Class 1, Section 1, 1877. 



Arthur Searle, who died October 23, 1920, was born in London on 

 October 21, 1837. His father, Thomas Searle, was an American pitizen 

 and a descendant of Governor Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts. 

 His mother, Anne Noble, came from Derby, England, being English 

 by birth as well as by ancestry. Thomas Searle seems to have been 

 naturally fitted for the life of a scholar and a man of letters, but the 

 restricted means of the family deprived him of a college education, and 

 forced him into mercantile business at an early age. At the time of 

 his marriage in 1834 he was a partner in a firm of London bankers. 

 It was during this sojourn in England that his son Arthur was born in 

 1837, and two years later his other son George. As a consequence of a 

 commercial panic Thomas returned in 1840 to America with his family 

 to look after business interests. His wife soon died, and two years 

 after in 1843 he himself passed away, leaving the care of the two boys 

 to his elder brother and a sister in Brookline, Mass. 



Both boys were sent early to private schools in Brookline and Rox- 

 bury, partly for the reason as Searle afterward suspected, to make life 

 easier for their elders, not accustomed to such lively youngsters. The 

 last school days were passed at the Brookline High School. Entering 

 Harvard College at the age of fourteen years, he was graduated in 

 1856, as the second scholar of his class. In 1859 he received his Master's 

 degree. Ai-thur, though only six years old at the time of his father's 

 death, had found in him a companion and an instructor. Under such 

 influence, the scholarly aspirations of the father seemed to have been 

 as seed to find fruition in the son's life. The boy had an alert mind. 

 At the age of seven he began his habit of psychological introspection 

 by the discovery, while meditating on some subject, that it was he 

 himself who was thinking. Thus, he became aware of the personal 

 identity that was Arthur Searle. Before this time he had made his 

 first experiment in physics, namely, as to the effect of centrifugal force 

 acting on a bit of wood placed inside the whirling rim of his aunt 

 Becky's spinning wheel. At eleven years he was interested in the 

 revolution in France, and began to have political opinions, which were 

 always conservative. But anything of a scientific nature fascinated 



