IV 



for indoctrinating an intending colonist in the art of field -surveying. 

 I did not leave him until we had completed the plan of Kennington 

 Common, and had calculated its acreage." On leaving this excellent 

 private school, after about two years' tuition, young Pritchard had 

 an opportunity of becoming a private pupil of the Head Master of 

 Christ's Hospital School, who was at that time permitted to take a 

 limited number of private pupils and place them in the public classes 

 under his own personal care. Here young Pritchard attended to his 

 classical studies with great diligence. He was accustomed to recall 

 to his mind, with satisfaction, that, for about a twelvemonth, he was 

 placed at the head of the Deputy Grecians. 



Owing to family pecuniary difficulties, arising from the failure of 

 a manufacture conscientiously but unsuccessfully persevered in by 

 his father, young Pritchard was reluctantly withdrawn from Christ's 

 Hospital School. A question now naturally arose in his family as to 

 the future occupation of the youth, who was not yet seventeen years 

 of age, and considered to possess a more than average amount of 

 scholastic knowledge, scientific tastes, and literary abilities. Fortu- 

 nately, by the advice and intervention of an elder brother, he was 

 permitted to follow his own devices for continuing his education as 

 best he could, with the ultimate hope that means would be found 

 somehow to enable him to enter one of the Universities. " So," he 

 has remarked, " I was left to my own resources, and happily a 

 genuine love of knowledge of any and every sort stirred within my 

 intellectual frame ; and, inasmuch as the most attainable form of 

 knowledge for the untutored was, and still is, mathematics, so to 

 mathematics I betook myself with a will." 



These two years, 1824 1826, were mostly devoted to self -instruc- 

 tion, and in this interval he made some acquaintance with the 

 contents of Wood's * Algebra,' Woodhouse's treatise on * Plane and 

 Spherical Trigonometry,' Dr. Lardner's treatises on ' Analytical 

 Geometry and the Differential Calculus,' and other mathematical 

 works. At the same time he attended some courses of lectures on 

 chemistry, delivered at Guy's Hospital. He was much interested in 

 these lectures, and ever after in the science, the benefit of which was 

 reaped in after years at Clapham. In 1825, when only seventeen, he 

 first felt the ambition of authorship, and published an ' Introduction 

 to Arithmetic,' in which the elementary properties of numbers are 

 explained and demonstrated on the simplest principles. In many 

 respects, these two years turned out to be an important epoch in the 

 life of Pritchard, for by the most determined perseverance in his 

 own studies, and by the assistance of friends and relatives, who 

 engaged to furnish temporarily the requisite funds, he was enabled, 

 soon a.fter Easter, 1826, to enrol his name on the books of St. John's 

 College, Cambridge. 



