A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



a century, and the full list of whom in the records of 

 history could be told on one's thumbs and fingers. His 

 biographers tell us things about him that read like the 

 most patent fairy-tales. As a mere infant in arms he 

 had been able to read fluently. Before his fourth 

 birthday came he had read the Bible twice through, as 

 well as Watts's Hymns poor child ! and when seven 

 or eight he had shown a propensity to absorb languages 

 much as other children absorb nursery tattle and Moth- 

 er Goose rhymes. When he was fourteen, a young lady 

 visiting the household of his tutor patronized the pretty 

 boy by asking to see a specimen of his penmanship. 

 The pretty boy complied readily enough, and mildly re- 

 buked his interrogator by rapidly writing some sen- 

 tences for her in fourteen languages, including such as 

 Arabian, Persian, and Ethiopic. 



Meantime languages had been but an incident in the 

 education of the lad. He seems to have entered every 

 available field of thought mathematics, physics, bot- 

 any, literature, music, painting, languages, philosophy, 

 archaeology, and so on to tiresome lengths and once 

 he had entered any field he seldom turned aside until he 

 had reached the confines of the subject as then known 

 and added something new from the recesses of his own 

 genius. He was as versatile as Priestley, as profound 

 as Newton himself. He had the range of a mere dilet- 

 tante, but everywhere the full grasp of the master. He 

 took early for his motto the saying that what one man 

 has done, another man may do. Granting that the 

 other man has the brain of a Thomas Young, it is a 

 true motto. 



Such, then, was the young Quaker who came to Lon- 



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