I.] PARENTAGE AND BOYUOOD. 17 



tendencies of his nature. The one is seen in the wish, 

 thus early formed, to take orders in the Church of Eng- 

 land, in which he was brought up, and to which he 

 remained ever strongly attached. From this aim he was 

 not without reluctance turned by the express desire of 

 his father that he should study for the Scottish Bar. This 

 accordingly from his fifteenth to his twenty-first year 

 was his ostensible purpose in life. But under this profes- 

 sional surface was working all the while the other and 

 deeper tendency of his nature. His head was busy 

 with mechanical contrivances, a new velocipedometer, 

 an anemometer, and a metal quadrant made by himself 

 for astronomical purposes. At the same time he was 

 devouring every scientific book he could lay hands on, 

 from the Nautical Almanac to Woodhouse's Astronomy. 

 But all this devotion to Science was kept strictly secret ; 

 he laboured at it in private and said nothing. His 

 father would have objected to these pursuits as too great 

 a strain on his young brain, too severe a tax on his 

 health, and as likely to divert him from the dry studies 

 of the Bar for which he was destined. Amid his con- 

 trivances and his reading, his pen was not idle. He had 

 begun to keep for himself a meteorological journal, 

 another journal of observations in astronomy and 

 geodesy, and a record of ideas and inventions. 



i >ne more extract from his autobiographic memoir of 

 1861, illustrative of these things, may here find place : 



'With 1 s -.> commences a personal record of a peculiar 



kind, a journal <f observations in astronomy and geodesy, 



continued with scarcely any interruption for seven years 



lie end of 1831, and extending to 6*51 pages, 8vo. 



On looking carefully over it now (December 1861), after 



ipse of exactly thirty years from its close, during which 



I have scarcely if ever opened it, I find in it a 



curious record of the development of my mind and 



tastes, by a process of the most purely individual and 



unaided study, whi< -h has a sort of interest of its own, 



independent 1\ <! the charm of personal recollection with 



c > 



