CHAPTER II. 



rOUTHFUL TRAVELS. 



TILL he had completed his sixteenth year Forbes was 

 entirely home-trained and self-educated. The home 

 training was such as belonged to a Scottish patrician 

 house, whose head was not only highly honourable and 

 refined, but more tender-hearted and serious than most 

 men of his own order at that day. The early death of 

 his mother, and the secluded life which he led from 

 childhood till manhood, were influences which entered 

 deeply into James Forbes's character, and were apparent 

 to the last. Pure, truthful, tender-hearted to all within 

 his own immediate circle ; not diffusive of sympathy, 

 nor given to fraternize with those beyond it ; serious, 

 scrupulous in all duty, intense and concentrated on 

 whatever he had on hand, these qualities, which in after 

 life distinguished him, grew naturally in such a home as 

 his. In boyhood he had no jostling with his fellows and 

 no schoolboy friends ; and when he went to College, the 

 daily ride home to Colinton left small time for College 

 acquaintanceship. 



For his intellectual training he was indebted mainly to 

 the processes he has himself described in his journal. 

 His real and early educators, more than the home gover- 

 ness and the village schoolmaster, were his meteoro- 

 logical and astronomical records and his 'Ideas of 

 Inventions/ By these, continued some of them for 

 years, he trained himself to be the patient and accurate 



