THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



CHAPTER I 



MY ANCESTORS AND PARENTS 



IT is duly recorded in a family Bible, there being then and there 

 no other means of recording such events, that I was born in the 

 then village of Newport, Kentucky, on February 20, 1841. I 

 was the second child of Nathaniel Burger Shaler and Ann Hinde 

 Southgate, having had an elder brother who died in infancy. 

 My parents had been married in 1834 ; at the time of my birth 

 my father was thirty-six years of age and my mother twenty- 

 five. Three other children survived to maturity, the one early 

 death apparently having been due to accident. 



Although the time when a man comes into the world and 

 the place where he appears are in certain ways important and 

 may well begin his story, the really weighty question concerns 

 his inheritances and the conditions in which they were devel- 

 oped. That he brings with him something that is in a measure 

 independent of all his progenitors, a certain individuality which 

 makes him distinct in essentials from like beings he succeeds, 

 is true vastly true ; but the way he is to go is, to a great 

 extent, shaped by those who sent him his life. I shall, therefore, 

 do what I can to set forth the nature of the people through 

 whom I came. 



As is usual with Americans, I cannot clearly trace my an- 

 cestors beyond the sea, or for more than four or five genera- 

 tions back. On my name side it is fairly certain that the 

 source was in central England, in the Warwickshire district, 

 with folk who in the seventeenth century bore the name in the 

 form of Shayler or Shaylor. Thence they seem to have moved 



