THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 267 



through the ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintance 

 with affairs of the outside world. . . . 



" I have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching the 

 different scenes we passed through, observing the various phases of 

 nature, both animate and inanimate ; though we did not, owing to my 

 infirmity, engage in conversation. It was during those delightful rides, 

 some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of 

 written language, that I began to ask myself the question : How came 

 the world into being ? When this question occurred to my mind, I set 

 myself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was awakened as 

 to what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon the 

 earth, and of vegetable life as well, and also the cause of the existence 

 of the earth, sun, moon, and stars. 



"I remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large old 

 stump which we happened to pass in one of our rides, I asked myself, 

 ' Is it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose out 

 of that stump ? But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble magv 

 nificent tree, and how came that tree ? Why, it came only by beginning 

 to grow out of the ground just like those little trees now coming up.' 

 And I dismissed from my mind, as an absurd idea, the connection 

 between the origin of man and a decaying old stump. . . . 



" I have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me the 

 question as to the origin of things. I had before this time gained ideas 

 of the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of animals, and 

 of the production of plants from seeds. The question that occurred to 

 my mind was : whence came the first man, the first animal, and the 

 first plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which there was no 

 man, no animal, no plant ; since I knew they all had a beginning and 

 an end. 



" It is impossible to state the exact order in which the.se different 

 questions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun, moon, 

 etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowed 

 upon man and the earth ; perhaps because I put man and beast in the 

 same class, since I believed that man would be annihilated and there was 

 no resurrection beyond the grave, —though I am told by my mother that, 

 in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who looked 

 to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make me understand that 

 he would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man and 

 beast derived their being from the same source, and were to be laid 

 down in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering the brute 

 animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level, 

 man and the earth were the two things on which my mind dwelled 

 most. 



" I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the de- 

 scent from parent to child and the propagation of animals. I was 

 ne.'irly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was ed- 



