538 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
He went to school for a short time with his brother, but sickness and 
the hostility of the other children toward these Bonapartists soon 
led to their being tutored at home, by a young man who knew how 
to combine pleasure with instruction. 
Melanchthon always remembered the dying injunction of his 
father: “I have seen many and great changes in the world, but greater 
ones are yet to follow, in which may God lead and guide you. Fear 
God, and do right” [25, p. 6]. Before this time (his father died 
when he was 11) he was, by his father’s express wishes, strictly 
educated, for a while in a local school, and then by a tutor, a con- 
scientious teacher and stern disciplinarian. Afterward he came more 
directly under the influence of the celebrated scholar Reuchlin, who 
was his relative. It was Reuchlin, impressed by the scholarship of 
the little boy, who changed his name from Schwartzerd to its Greek 
equivalent Melanchthon. Of his earlier childhood it is related that 
he often gathered his schoolfellows around him to discuss what they 
had been reading and learning; and his grandfather delighted to 
engage him in learned disputes with traveling scholars, whom he 
usually confounded. 
The brief sketches preceding tend to confirm the rule, I believe, that 
children of genius are exposed to significantly great amounts of in- 
tellectual stimulation by adults and experience very restricted con- 
tacts with other children of their age. Nor should we overlook the 
fact that books themselves, to which these children are so much 
attached, are representatives of the adult world. This is true in the 
superficial sense that they are provided by adults and, more signifi- 
cantly, may be drawn from a father’s sacred hbrary (one thinks of 
Leibniz, Leopardi, even Chatterton) ; it is true in the profounder sense 
that they are written by adults, and, in the case of most of the reading 
done by these children, for adults. Books extend the boundaries of 
the adult empire. 
There is an effect in this constant intercourse with the adult world 
which may be especially important in the development of genius. Not 
only is there an increase of knowledge, which is the usual aim of the 
instructors; there is also, in many cases, a profound excitement of 
imagination. Even John Stuart Mill confesses that he did not per- 
fectly understand such grave works as the more difficult dialogs of 
Plato when he read them in Greek at 7. What, then, happens to such 
adult material pouring into the child’s mind? Mill does not elucidate 
his own case; but there is evidence in a number of the biographies 
before me that the dynamic processes of fantasy go to work on it and 
richly transform both what is understood and what is not. 
Much of Goethe’s association with other children was simply an occa- 
sion for expressing his vivid fantasy life; he entranced them with 
stories of imaginary adventures. Musset, also, reveled in a world of 
make-believe based upon the Arabian Nights and similar literature, 
