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processes and machinery. Hoi'ace learnt very early a simple method 

 of drawing from nature, by a system that did not involve scientific 

 explanations, and when he was eight or nine years old, he would try 

 to desci'ibe machines to his mother by drawing them. He afterwards 

 showed a talent for drawing figures, and might have excelled in that 

 accomplishment, if he could have found time from more absorbing 

 occupations for it. 



Early exercises and sports in geometry made him practically familiar 

 with that branch of mathematics, which was always easy to him, and 

 he was a good arithmetician and algebraist when quite young. His 

 first lessons in geography were from that edition of Woodbridge's 

 Atlas that has figures of animals and plants in their respective locali- 

 ties, and from an encyclopedic work on the subject, illustrated on 

 every page with fine wood-cuts. He excelled in drawing maps, and 

 from his habit of poring over pictures, and from oral instruction upon 

 geography and history combined, the lines of maps were never 

 unmeaning lines to him. He was particularly charmed with Goethe's 

 mountain, on which the vegetation of dift'crent latitudes is paralleled 

 by dift'crent altitudes. When he became a botanist the geographical 

 distribution of plants was very interesting to him, and he was always 

 in the habit of reading with a map by liis side. 



When in Washington for two winters he enjoyed the freedom of the 

 Patent OtHce, and became familiar with the objects obtained on Wilkes' 

 Exploring Expedition, and also with Mr. Titian Peele's collection of the 

 Fauna of the District of Columbia. The model machine rooms were 

 also very attractive to him, and all that could be then seen of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, at that time in its infancy. 



His boyish desire for travel was to see the scenery of the world, 

 rather than of man's achievements or their ruins, and he used to make 

 himself quite unhapp}^ with the fear tliat cultivation and railroads 

 would go everywhere before he should be old enough to see his own 

 country' in all its wildness. 



French was taught him in his childhood by living speech, and he 

 studied both Latin and German by a colloquial, rather than by a gram- 

 matical method, when quite young, but his knowledge of those 

 languages was not extensive. His philological powers, however, 

 were well exercised by these early studies, so that he had a good 

 command of his own language. He had no taste for the classics; 

 there were too many interesting books to read, and things to do, to 

 waste time upon them, as he thought. The love of nature, which dates 

 back into his early childhood, from the time when he felt the quiet 

 enjoyment of the new world, on the flowery banks of Concord river, 

 sitting in his basket cax'riage, and the contemplative rambles of later 

 life, in the same vicinity, leave on an observer the impression of a 



