56 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



officers and soldiers. Vaughan knew much of astronomy and 

 was a man of imagination and of great descriptive powers. His 

 talks were beyond my understanding, but I had from them a 

 dim sense of vastness which perplexed me. At this time, my 

 father in some way obtained for the period of several months 

 the use of a small reflector telescope which, as I remember it, 

 had a mirror about ten inches in diameter; it was made, I 

 believe, by a man named Barlow of Lexington, Kentucky, who 

 made an orrery, or planetarium, showing the movements of sev- 

 eral of the leaders of the solar system, which was kept in the 

 Mercantile Library of Cincinnati, and in which I greatly de- 

 lighted. The telescope, which I soon learned to manage, was good 

 enough to open the heavens to me : up to that time only the sun 

 and moon had in any way moved me. The lunar craters greatly 

 excited my curiosity, as did also the satellites of Jupiter, but the 

 great awakener was the ring of Saturn. I do not clearly see why 

 it was so, but the sight of that ring system was intellectually the 

 most important single incident of my life ; this first impression 

 and the memory of the startling effect of it on my mind, stays 

 by me with a distinctness that belongs to nothing else of that 

 time. 



I have thus told in brief the conditions of my surroundings 

 which served to awaken and in some measure to restrain the 

 awakening of my mind. It is fit now to set forth the little I 

 have to say concerning the effects of this desultory education, 

 by noting certain states of my mind. First, as to what is termed 

 religion. On this side I was little developed. My father never 

 went to any church, and though he was always silent on the 

 subject, I easily knew that he attached little importance to 

 what was taught there. My mother was in a limited way a 

 church-goer and kept a pew in the Episcopal church, though 

 she often went to the Methodist meetings, taking me to one or 

 the other. Of these churches, both of the orthodox type, I 

 remember only the tedium of the performance and the develop- 

 ment of an intense hatred of the being who, with the power to 



