228 A Century of Science 



name which it is to be hoped it may always keep, 

 a name bestowed in the good old times before 

 the national vice of magniloquence had begun to 

 deface our maps. Among the pleasure drives in 

 the neighbourhood of Boston, the drive around Spot 

 Pond is perhaps foremost in beauty. A few fine 

 houses have been built upon its borders, and well- 

 kept roads have given to some parts of the forest 

 the aspect of a park, but the greater part of the 

 territory is undisturbed, and will probably remain 

 so. Seventy years ago the pruning hand of civi- 

 lization had scarcely touched it. To his grand- 

 father's farm, on the outskirts of this enchanting 

 spot, the boy Parkman was sent in his eighth year. 

 There, he tells us, " I walked twice a day to a 

 school of high but undeserved reputation, about 

 a mile distant, in the town of Medford. Here I 

 learned very little, and spent the intervals of 

 schooling more profitably in collecting eggs, in- 

 sects, and reptiles, trapping squirrels and wood- 

 chucks, and making persistent though rarely for- 

 tunate attempts to kill birds with arrows. After 

 four years of this rustication I was brought back 

 to Boston, when I was unhappily seized with a 

 mania for experiments in chemistry, involving a 

 lonely, confined, unwholesome sort of life, baneful 

 to body and mind." No doubt the experience of 



