really hated, his return from Elba, his final defeat at Waterloo, and the restoration of the Bourbons. But, though she detested Napoleon and his system, these things gave her no pleasure. The spectacle of an invaded and a dismembered France aroused her strongest feelings of patriotism, and she loved liberty too truly and too ardently to rejoice in the influences that triumphed in 1815. Her last years were chiefly spent in the composition of her "Considerations on the French Revolution," in which she sums up the convictions of her life. It is one of her most valuable and most lasting books. The disproportioned prominence which is naturally assigned in it to Necker, and the manifest personal element in her antipathy to Napoleon, impair its weight, indeed, as a history; but few writers have criticised with more justice the successive stages of the Revolution, and few books of its generation are so rich in political wisdom. The concluding chapters, in which, in a strain of noble eloquence, she pleads the cause of moderate and constitutional freedom, show how steadily and how strongly, in an age of many disenchantments, she clung to the belief of her youth.

The "Considerations on the French Revolution " had a vast and an immediate success, and in a few days 60,000 copies were sold. Madame de Staël, however, did not live to witness her triumph. In February, 1817, she was struck down by a paralytic illness, and on July 14, after a long period of complete prostration, she passed away tranquilly in her sleep. It was a peaceful ending to an agitated and checkered career. She had enjoyed much and suffered much. She had committed grave faults, and had met with her full share of disappointment and ingratitude; but few women have left such an enduring monument behind them, or have touched human life on so many sides and with so many sympathies.

W. E. II. LECKY.

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES.

IF we accept modern theories of heredity to their fullest extent, we must admit that the influences which form the man may begin to act generations before his birth; but I know nothing of my ancestry that would fully explain the early bent of my mind, or the direction which the activities of my life have taken. Both my parents were of New England descent so pure that I have to go back four or five generations to discover an ancestor of European birth; but I cannot find that any of my progenitors within the last two centuries was a laureate of Harvard or of any other college, or acted a prominent part in the history of his country. The first Simon Newcomb, from whom I am a descendant in the sixth generation, was early in the last century a Connecticut farmer or fisherman, and my grandfather, the fourth of the name, is reached before anything ap pears to suggest the seeds of the intellectual life. He was a stone-cutter by trade; but he owned a copy of the "Elements" of Euclid, and tradition credits him with unusual learning, and with having, at some time, taught school. My maternal grandfather was of higher social position-a "squire," a Puritan of the strictest sect, and a pillar of the Baptist Church.

My birthplace was in the northern part of Nova Scotia, and the surroundings of my childhood and youth have deeply tinged the economic views of my later years. People lived there much as the settlers of New England lived before the Revolu tion. The children of all but the rich went barefoot in Summer, and, except the rare and costly Sunday suit, nearly every family had to make its own clothes. The men and boys tilled the ground, or cut and sawed lumber for exportation to more favored climes; the women and girls sheared the sheep, carded the wool, spun the yarn, wove the homespun cloth, and made the clothes. My father followed the occupation-rather precarious in such a locality-of teaching school. In his ideas of

education he was a disciple of William Cobbetta circumstance which did not tend to give him popularity or to promote his success. The learning of arithmetic and grammar by the glib repetition of rules was a system that he held in contempt, and in consequence parents were seldom fully satisfied with the results of his teaching. It thus happened that my early years were passed in a number of places, in all of which, however, the economic and social conditions were much the same.

One result of my father's occupation was that I breathed, in early childhood, an atmosphere which had at least the scent of learning. The spelling book was more familiar than the plow, and the idea that there was a correct way of using language was acquired at as early an age as if we had lived in cultivated society. When I was five years old, my father used in Winter to draw me to school on a hand sled, and at six I had developed a strong taste for "doing sums." Six months later I was well advanced in arithmetic, and then an incident occurred that profoundly affected my father's policy in conducting my education. I have no distinct recollection of it, but was accustomed to hear it alluded to as an attack of mental abstraction of a singular kind. Many years afterward my father wrote:

"You had lost all relish for study, reading, play, or talk, and sat most of the day flat on the floor or hearth, or in a corner. When sent on an errand, you would half the time forget what you went for. You would frequently jump up from the corner and ask some curious question.. From the time you were taken down until you commenced recovery, about a month elapsed. . . . After a few weeks I began to examine you in figures, and found you had forgotten nearly all you had ever learned."

This supposed result of overstudy made my father extremely cautious in allowing me the use of books. Of regular schooling -sitting down to prescribed tasks, reciting lessons, and passing examinations--it might almost be said that I had none. Partly from necessity, partly from a fear of overstudy and a desire to strengthen my bodily constitution, about half of my time from the age of eight to that of sixteen was spent in working on farms. The more intelligent of the farmers generally had two or three books, which I had occasional opportunities to read by the light of the blazing fire in Winter evenings. During the inter

vals at home I had better opportunities for reading, and when I was twelve years old my father started me in algebra. His sole knowledge of the subject was derived from Hammond's "Algebra," one of the ancestral volumes already alluded to-a ridiculous work from our present point of view, and even then nearly a century old. If I remember the author's introduction aright, he had written the book for some of his friends, who could not grapple with the ordinary treatises on the subject.

Under such conditions as I have described, important epochs in the moral and intellectual development of a boy may be marked by circumstances which, in spheres now familiar to us, would have been quite unimportant. Three such epochs are prominent in my memory. At the age of five years I was guilty of a fault the precise nature of which has escaped me, but I think it was the telling of an untruth. My mother reasoned with me somewhat as Paul did with Felix, and awoke, for the first time, the faculty of conscience. From that time forward my discernment of right and wrong was keen. I have always regarded this little incident as possibly containing a hint of the direction in which we should look for the development of the moral sense in infancy. Is there a particular epoch in each life, after the age of entire thoughtlessness, and before that when mental habits have crystallized, when the iron is hot, so to speak, and when the character can be hammered into any required shape? I merely suggest this question without attempting to answer it.

Up to the age of twelve the laws of nature remained a mystery to me. About that time I remember once asking my father what light was, and why we could not see in the dark. He tried to give me an idea of something he had read or heard on the subject, but the question was one which nothing in our reading could help to answer. He could tell about gravitation, the names and order of the planets, history, and navigation; but I doubt if a work on natural philosophy had ever fallen within his reach. But one day after school I saw, lying on the desk of one of the scholars, an unusual-looking book, which proved to be Mrs. Marcet's "Conversations on Natural Philosophy." I devoured it in a very few days, by stealthily making my way into the school house after hours. Never since have I tasted

such intellectual pleasure as was offered by this first insight into the mysteries of nature.

One of my grandfather's books was the "Elements" of Euclid. It stood on the shelf with Hammond's "Algebra," and with Moore's "Navigator "-the precursor of our familiar Bowditch-but until I had passed the age of thirteen I never noticed that there was anything of interest in it. How I could have lived so long without trying to fathom the mystery of its queer diagrams, I cannot now explain. I was led to a more careful examination by a reference in Hammond's "Algebra " to the celebrated forty-seventh proposition of the first book, and was equally surprised and delighted to find a course of reasoning from self-evident principles. Very soon I found something not self-evident taken for granted, but I soon discovered that certain numbers in the margin referred to a previous proof. Thus I went back, step by step, to the beginning of the book. It was my first idea of a mathematical demonstration, and I was so delighted with the new world of thought that, walking out with a younger brother, I imparted the new idea to him, demonstrating the principal theorems leading to the Pythagorean proposition by diagrams penciled on the ends of the logs in a pile of wood. Algebra I had found hard, but here was something so easy that a child might understand it. When I reached the fifth book, however—that on proportions-the prolixity of the propositions and demonstrations tired me completely; and as I was reading solely for love, I did not follow the subject much longer.

Notwithstanding that I had health, and a liking for every kind of activity, physical and mental, my early life was a period that I would not live over again. The feeling that I was unfit for the sphere to which fate had condemned me, oppressed me from a very early age. I was looked upon by the farming population as a prodigy of learning, and was occasionally complimented by a preacher. This was pleasant; but when, as sometimes happened, one person said to another, "Look at that boy; he has more larnin' than any grown man miles 'round," I felt as if he were pointing out some hideous deformity in my constitution. In my own eyes I was a lusus naturæ, born with a taste for things which were of no use, and without any of