ii8 The Smithsonian Institution 



tives this was his chief interest. He became an amateur 

 actor, organized a juvenile theatrical company, "The Ros- 

 trum," and translated a play from the French, which his 

 young friends acted under his direction. Thus, perhaps, 

 were laid the foundations of subsequent success as a public 

 speaker and presiding officer. 



His taste for books was first aroused by Sir Henry Brooke's 

 " Fool of Quality," which he chanced to open when a boy of 

 eight or ten. This philosophical romance aroused his interest 

 in social problems, and led him through the pathway of fiction 

 to form the habit of reading. 



President Porter has pointed out the intimate relationship 

 between this early aimless life and his later career: 



" His early musings and questionings, his boyish sports 

 and adventures, were fondly remembered by him as the in- 

 spiration of his rational and scientific life. ' The cultivation 

 of the imagination,' he writes, ' should be considered an es- 

 sential part of a liberal education; and this may be spread 

 over the whole course of instruction, for, like the reasoning 

 faculties, the imagination may continue to improve until late 

 in life.' ' Memory, imitation, imagination, and the faculty of 

 forming mental habits exist in early life, while the judgment 

 and reasoning faculties are of slow growth.' 'The order of 

 nature is that of art before science, the entire concrete first 

 and the entire abstract last.' These are wise and weighty 

 words, but they are of special interest when we bethink our- 

 selves that the writer, when he penned them, was doubtless 

 all the while thinking of a dreaming boy, half buried in the 

 grass, looking up wistfully into the sky, thinking wondrous 

 thoughts too deep for tears, perhaps peopling with phantoms 

 and fairies that world of nature which he subsequently pene- 

 trated by those wise questionings and ingenious theories 

 which his sagacious experiments turned into solid verities. 

 He certainly could have been thinking of no one else when 

 in the same connection he so positively affirms, ' The future 



