THE 



AMERICAN 

 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, &c. 



Art. I. — Memoir of the Ldfe and Charade?^ of Nathaniel Bow- 

 ditch, LL. D.j P. R. S. ; by Rev. Alexander Young, 



Nathaniel Bowditch was born at Salem, in the Common- 

 wealth of Massachusetts, on the 26th day of March, 1773, He 

 was the fomth child of Habakkuk and Mary Ingersoll Bowditch. 

 His ancestors, for three generations, had been shipmasters, and 

 his father, on retiring from that perilous mode of hard industry, 

 carried on the trade of a cooper, by which he gained a scanty and 

 precarious subsistence for a family of seven children, 



I had a curiosity to trace up the life of this wonderful man, if 

 possible, to his childhood, to ascertain his early character and pow- 

 ers, and the influences under which his heart and mind had been 

 formed. Accordingly, on a recent visit to Salem, I took a walk, 

 of some two or three miles, to see a house where he used to say 

 that he and his mother had lived when he was as yet hardly ad- 

 vanced beyond infancy. My walk brought me among the pleas- 

 ant farm-houses of a retired hamlet in Essex county ; and I found 

 the plain two-story house,* with but two small rooms in it, where 

 he dwelt with his mother ; and I saw the chamber-window where 

 he said she used to sit and show him " the new moon with the 

 old moon in her arm," and, with the poetical superstition of a 

 sailor's wife, jingle the silver in her pocket that her husband 



^ This house is in Danvers, near the junction of several roads, this side of the 

 Derby farm. See wood cut, next page. 



YoL. XXXV.— No. 1. 1 



