SKETCH OF CHESTER S. LYMAN. 117 



rized for himself a rude telescope by means of his mother's spectacles, 

 a small burning-lens, and a yard-stick. In later life he said, " I can 

 never forget the delight with which I turned this upon the Pleiades, 

 and for the first time saw this cluster expand into a large number of 

 brighter stars." From Gibson and Bowditch he learned, without a 

 teacher, the rudiments of geometry and trigonometry, and in due time 

 obtained a good knowledge of surveying and navigation. 



When he was thirteen a copy of Ferguson's " Astronomy " fell into 

 his hands, and was devoured by him as eagerly as most boys read 

 "Robinson Crusoe." He also had access to the articles "Astronomy," 

 " Optics," and some others, in the " Edinburgh Encyclopaedia." From 

 thirteen until he was sixteen, except the twelve weeks of Latin men- 

 tioned farther on, he spent most of his spare time either studying, 

 entirely without assistance, or in a little tool-shop of his fatJier's, con- 

 structing astronomical and other instruments which he had never seen 

 except in the diagrams of his few much-prized books. Among these 

 instruments, w^uch were mainly of wood, were a quadrant, sextant, 

 terrestrial and celestial globes, orrery, eclipsareon, solar microscope, 

 and many others. He also constructed a reflecting Herschelian tele- 

 scope four feet long, which enabled him to show Jupiter's satellites 

 and belts, Saturn's rings, the moon, and other celestial objects, to the 

 country-folk who came from miles around to look through it. He 

 computed all the eclipses for fifteen years to come, and made alma- 

 nacs for 1830 and 1831. In order to give the places of the planets in 

 these almanacs (never having seen a nautical almanac or astronomical 

 tables of the planets), he made rough tables for himself, computing 

 them from the elements of the planet's orbits as given in his book on 

 natural philosophy. When about fourteen he with five other boys 

 was made the subject of an experiment in teaching Latin, which im- 

 pressed him with a life-long conviction that, in the ordinary methods 

 of teaching the classics, one half the time at least is unnecessarily 

 wasted. 



The Rev. V. R. Osborn bad recently started in Manchester a school 

 in which he aimed to apply what was then widely known as the Ham- 

 iltonian system of instruction to the classics — a system, in the main, 

 advocated by Milton and Locke, as well as by other high authorities 

 in education, from Cardinal Wolsey and Erasmus down to Hamilton, 

 who used it in the early part of this century. In order to settle a con- 

 troversy in the Hartford papers as to the merits of the system, it was 

 suggested that it should be applied in teaching a class of boys who 

 knew absolutely no Latin. Accordingly, young Lyman (not then a 

 member of the school) and a few others were invited to form the class. 

 At the first meeting the first six lines of the "^neid " were slowly read 

 and translated by Mr. Hart, the teacher, with explanations, the boys 

 one at a time repeating the translation after him, sentence by sentence, 

 until all had gone over the lesson. It was afterward made familiar by 



