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Rh sense." Being afflicted from early childhood with a pain in his head, he was not sent early to school, but was taught at home. He afterward went to the parish school for a short time, but showed little promise of scholarship, and never could acquire an accurate style of reading or become even a moderately good speller. He was withdrawn from school because of family exigencies just at the time he was beginning to have a longing desire for a better education. This had been awakened by the sight in a shop window of the first number of the Penny Magazine, which he bought; and he continued to buy the successive numbers, and read them with zest. Shortly afterward he read Thomas Dick's Christian Philosopher, and was struck with the novelty of the ideas. He then procured other books on physical science, among which was Joyce's Scientific Dialogues. "At first," he says, "I became bewildered, but soon the beauty and simplicity of the conceptions filled me with delight and astonishment, and I began then in earnest to study the matter. . . . Even at the very commencement of my studies it was not the facts and details of the physical sciences which riveted my attention, but the laws and principles which they were intended to illustrate. This necessarily determined me to study the sciences in something like systematic form; for, in order to understand a given law, I was generally obliged to make myself acquainted with the preceding law or conditions on which it depended. I remember well that, before I could make headway in physical astronomy, . . . I had to go back and study the laws of motion and the fundamental principles of mechanics. In like manner I studied pneumatics, hydrostatics, light, heat, electricity, and magnetism. I obtained assistance from no one. In fact, there were none of my acquaintances who knew anything whatever about these subjects." But he had no taste for chemistry or especially for geology, and a suggestion made at that time that he would one day be a professional geologist would have been repelled as incredible. Seeking for an occupation to give him a livelihood, he served an apprenticeship to a millwright and worked for a time as a journeyman, repairing thrashing machines on the estates where they were situated. The conditions of this life were not pleasant, and he applied himself to house joinering, in which he had acquired considerable skill, at Kinrossie, Glasgow, and Paisley. He had when a boy received a hurt on his left elbow, from the effects of which he had never recovered. The wound now began to assume a serious character, and he was obliged to give up the joiner business and find some easier pursuit.

Not having the education, qualification, or taste to be a clerk, he concluded that some sort of occupation in the tea trade might suit him. He went to Perth to see what could be done, and,