4 PARENTAGE AND YOUTH CHAP, i 



In this well-ordered household, where both the 

 father and mother had read widely, much was done to 

 foster a love of literature among the younger members. 

 It was one of the practices of the family that on at 

 least one morning of the week French should be the 

 language of the breakfast-table. On other mornings a 

 paper from the Spectator would be read, or a passage 

 from some standard English author. And doubtless 

 the achievements of science, as far as they could be 

 made intelligible and interesting, were often subjects of 

 conversation. 



Such was the household in which Andrew Crombie 

 Ramsay was born on the 3ist January 1814. Of his 

 early years little record has been preserved. From 

 his mother's letters we learn that when five years old, 

 during a painful operation on one of his fingers, he 

 showed such self-possession as to earn from the 

 surgeon the encomium of being ' the most determined 

 little fellow he had ever seen.' In a letter written to 

 his wife in 1854, when his eldest daughter was a child, 

 he says : ' I fancy I see Ella in the hayfield. These 

 early days are never lost. I recollect them on rare 

 occasions. I remember the first time I saw cowslips in 

 a field ; how amazed and charmed I was ! The mind 

 drinks in beauty in early life that never leaves it, if of 

 good quality. Happy is the child whose first im- 

 pressions are not of smoke, bricks, and gutters.' 



For some time his health appears to have been deli- 

 cate. At nine or ten years of age he was removed from 

 Glasgow, and sent to the Parish School at Saltcoats, a 

 little village on the coast of Ayrshire, where the sea-air 

 might enable him to gain strength, and throw off his 

 ailments. An observant boy could hardly have been 

 placed in a position better fitted to stimulate his 



