outstripped the father’s power of explanation. He wished “to know the reason of everything;” and when his father’s statements did not appear to him to give the reason, he was far from satisfied.
“For he had always an admirable perspicacity in discerning what was false; and it may be said that in everything and always truth was the sole object of his mind. From his childhood he could only yield to what seemed to him evidently true; and when others spoke of good reasons, he tried to find them for himself. He never quitted a subject until he had found some explanation which satisfied him.”
Once, among other occasions, he was so interested in the fact that the sound emitted by a plate lying on a table when struck, suddenly ceased on the plate being touched by the hand, that he made an inquiry into sound in general, and drew so many conclusions that he embodied them in a “well-reasoned” treatise. At this time he was only twelve years of age.
At the same age he gave still more astonishing evidence of his precocious scientific capacities. His father, page 10perceiving his strong scientific bent, and desirous that he should first of all acquaint himself with languages before the absorption of the severer, but more engrossing, study seized him, had withdrawn from his sight all mathematical books, and carefully avoided the subject in the presence of his son when his friends were present. This, as might be expected, only quickened the curiosity of the boy, who frequently begged his father to teach him mathematics, and the father promised to do so as a reward when he knew Latin and Greek, which he was then learning. Piqued by this resistance, the boy asked one day, “What mathematical science was, and of what it treated?” He was told that its aim was to make figures correctly, and to find their right relations or proportions to one another. He began, says his sister, to meditate during his play-hours on the information thus communicated to him.