180 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



President of the Society. Meanwhile, the watchmaker had left 

 Albany, and young Henry, no longer having the fear of the 

 silversmith's file and crucible before his eyes, was left free to follow 

 the lead of his dramatic tastes and aspirations. He dramatized a 

 tale, and prepared a comedy; both of which were acted by the 

 association. Indeed, so much was he absorbed in this new vocation 

 that our amateur Roscius seemed, according to all outward appear- 

 ance, in a fair way of making a place for himself among the 

 "periwig-pated fellows who tear a passion to tatters" on the stage; 

 or, at the best, of taking rank with the great dramatic artists who, 

 standing in front of the garish foot-lights, "hold the mirror up 

 to nature " in a sense far different from that of the experimental 

 philosopher, standing in the clear beams of that lumen siccum which 

 Bacon has praised as the light that is best of all for the eyes of 

 the mind. But in the midst of these disguises, under which the 

 unique and original genius of Henry has thus far seemed to be 

 masquerading, we have now come to the time when his mind under- 

 went a great transfiguration, which revealed its native brightness, 

 and a transfiguration as sudden as it was great. 



Minds richly endowed, if started at first in a wrong direction, 

 may sometimes have, it would seem, an intellectual conversion as 

 marked as that moral conversion which is often visible in the lives 

 of great saints. It certainly was so in the case of Henry. Over- 

 taken in the sixteenth year of his age by a slight accident, which 

 detained him for a season within doors, he chanced, in search of 

 mental diversion, to cast his eyes upon a book which a Scotch gentle- 

 man, boarding with his mother, had left upon the table in his 

 chamber. It was Dr. Gregory's Lectures on Experimental Phi- 

 losophy, Astronomy, and Chemistry. It commences with an address 

 to the young reader, in which the author stimulates him to deeper 

 inquiry concerning the familiar objects around him. " You throw 

 a stone," he says, "or shoot an arrow upwards into the air; why 

 does it not go forward in the air, and in the direction you give it ? 

 What force is it that presses it down to the earth ? Why does 

 flame or smoke always mount upward ? You look into a clear well 

 of water, and see your own face and figure, as if painted there; 

 why is this? You are told it is done by reflection of light. But 



