14 THE LIFE OF JAMES D. FORBES. [CHAP. 



boy's health made his father nervously anxious lest he 

 should overwork himself. In this easy and desultory 

 home teaching he picked up the necessary reading, 

 writing, arithmetic, and the first elements of Latin. 

 What more was needed he was able to teach himself. 

 Equipped with these necessary elements, his mind was 

 free to follow its own bent, and to turn his small acquire- 

 ments to the uses which his own nature prompted. By 

 his twelfth year that bent had clearly declared itself in 

 favour of physical science, although from deference to 

 the known wishes of his father he was obliged long to 

 conceal it. 



The first dawnings of his scientific bias are well 

 described in a retrospect of his early years, which he 

 drew up at St. Andrews, in 1861. 



Portion of Journal written in St. Andrews in 1861. 

 [18211824.] 



It is a very curious occupation to reflect how the tastes 

 and destinies of after-life are foreshadowed in the ten- 

 dencies of childhood and youth. Some of my most 

 childish and immature occupations and fancies have a 

 close relation to the serious occupations to which nearly 

 the whole of my middle and after-life has been devoted. 

 And any success which has attended these efforts is in a 

 measure probably due to my having been suffered to 

 follow the strong bent of a natural predisposition for 

 certain employments. 



A love of collecting curiosities is too commonplace to 

 deserve mention. A love of mechanical contrivance is 

 also common, and was not earlier developed in me than 

 perhaps in most boys with equal advantages. The 

 wright's shop at Colinton was from (I suppose) my 

 ninth or tenth year a source of great pleasure ; and by 

 the aid of lead castings I succeeded in making trains of 

 toothed wheels, in which I took particular delight. An 

 apparatus of this kind intended to be applied to measure 

 the distance moved over by a velocipede was an occu- 



