344 NINETEENTH CENTURY. VT. 



of it was Ampere, one of the professors at the iScoIe Poly- 

 technique in Paris. We must pause a moment to learn 

 something of the early history of this man, for it is very inte- 

 resting. Andre Ampere was born at Lyons in 1775. When 

 he was quite a little boy he delighted in arithmetic, and 

 used to do long sums for his amusement by means of little 

 pebbles which he arranged in groups. Once when he had a 

 severe illness his mother took the stones away, but, having 

 left him alone one day for a little time, she found on her re- 

 turn that he had broken his biscuit into little bits and was 

 using them to work with instead of his lost pebbles. As he 

 grew older his father began to teach him Latin, but the boy 

 disliked it so much that it was given up, and he devoted all 

 his time to Algebra and Euclid. 



One day he persuaded his father to take him to his friend, 

 the Abbe Daburon, to borrow the writings of Euler and 

 Bernouilli, two great mathematicians. The Abbe stared at 

 this little boy, only twelve years old, asking for books which 

 very few men could understand. ' Do you know, my little 

 fellow,* said he, * that these works are written in Latin, and 

 that the differential calculus is used in them?' Andre's 

 countenance fell for a moment, for he knew neither of these 

 things. But he soon brightened up again. * Never mind,' 

 he replied, ' I can learn them,' and he set to work that very 

 day to learn Latin with his father, and the differential calculus 

 with the Abb^, and in a few months was able to come back 

 for the books he coveted. 



Before he was eighteen he had not only read the whole 

 of Laplace's *Mecanique Ce'leste,' but had even worked 

 out all the complicated problems in it. He had, however, 

 overtaxed his brain, and when his father was killed in the 

 terrible French Revolution of 1793, the grief broke down his 



