Edward Claypole, The Man.—Bridge. 31 
While a man lives his character and career are in the mak- 
ing. The final estimate can never be made in life, for until its 
end the evidence is never quite all in. Death alone permits the 
case to be closed and submitted to the judgment of history. 
History is said to grow calm and judicial by time; it also 
may grow hazy and unfair. It fixes on the more tangible facts 
of a man’s career like his battles, his campaigns or his recorded 
acts, and deals more or less justly with them. But it often 
misses the best part of him, which is his character and work in 
the unturbulent calm of life, as these affect men and women 
about him, and mould and change them, and even create their 
careers for them. 
Who most has influenced the lives of others? What lives 
so affected have most changed the careers of still others? The 
answers to these questions reveal the real place of a man in 
society. 
Professor Claypole’s life comprised a volume of numerous 
lessons and many kinds of instruction. 
Born in England and coming down from a line of 
superior people and scholars on both sides of his family, he 
inherited a love of learning and a disposition to study and wis- 
dom. His father and paternal grandfather were Baptist cler- 
gymen and fine classical scholars, and his own taste was nat- 
urally toward the classics and literature. But in his childhood 
some cultivated women, sisters of his remarkable mother, took 
him out into the fields and showed him some of the beauties 
and possibilities of botany and geology, and his enthusiasm 
was instantly aroused. Here was an opportunity to study 
things, not merely the writings about things and thoughts: 
and the taste then created continued through life; it determined 
his career and made of him a great teacher and an authority on 
science. 
He was a voracious reader and student, a devourer of 
encyclopedias and all manner of the strongest books, even in 
childhood. Taken once to a lecture on astronomy at eleven 
years of age he startled his family on reaching home by cor- 
recting the lecturer as to some of his facts and figures, and 
did it from memory of what he had read unknown to his elders. 
In pursuit of his education he met with difficulties. His 
clerical ancestors were dissenters from the established church. 
