SIMON NEWCOMB 365 



During his boyhood days, owing to the nature of his father's 

 vocation, the movings of the family were frequent, although until 

 he was four years of age Simon lived in the home of his paternal 

 grandfather, about two miles from the village of Wallace. Here 

 he was taught the alphabet by his aunts and he says, himself: "I 

 was reading the Bible in class and beginning geography when I 

 was six." In greater detail perhaps, he writes: 



"I began to study arithmetic when I was five years old, and 

 when six, I am told, I was very fond of doing sums. At twelve I 

 was studying algebra, and about that time I began to teach. I 

 remember that I was thirteen when I first took up Euclid. There 

 was a copy of it among my father's works." 



After the boy had grown to manhood his father wrote for him 

 an account of his early life from which the following extract is 

 taken: 



"At fifteen you studied Euclid, and were enraptured with it. 

 It is a little singular that all this time you never showed any self- 

 esteem ; or spoke of getting into employment at some future day, 

 among the learned. The pleasure of intellectual exercise in 

 demonstrating or analyzing a geometrical problem, or solving an 

 algebraic equation, seemed to be your only object. Your almost 

 intuitive knowledge of geography, navigation, and nautical matters 

 in general caused me to think most ardently of writing to the 

 Admiral at Halifax, to know if he would give you a place among the 

 midshipmen of the navy; but my hope of seeing you a leading 

 lawyer, and finally a judge on the bench, together with the pos- 

 sibility that your mother would not consent, and the possibility that 

 you would not wish to go, deterred me." 



Newcomb in his Reminiscences of this period writes: 



"Among the books which profoundly influenced my mode of 

 life and thought during the period embraced in the foregoing 

 extracts were Fowler's Phrenology and Combe's Constitution of 

 Man. It may appear strange to the reader if a system so com- 

 pletely exploded as that of phrenology should have any value as a 

 mental discipline. Its real value consisted, not in what it taught 

 about the position of the * organs/ but in presenting a study of 

 human nature, which, if not scientific in form, was truly so in 



