Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/273

Rh cited as the most precocious of infant prodigies. You were nine months old when you first saw the sky at night. You saw a star come out. You obstinately pointed out the shining spot to your mother, who was also your nurse. You discovered a second, with the same astonishment. You greeted the third, the fourth, with the same cry of joy and the same enthusiasm; it was necessary to put you to bed, you were so excited by your new occupation of star-finding. That evening brought your first contact with infinity and your first lesson in astronomy; you were the youngest professor known.

I have been told that you were a delicate, alert, charming child, spoiled and adored by your parents; a terrible illness suffered at the age of five years, as a result of which it was feared that you would never be able to speak again, left you more delicate, timid and somewhat awkward, so that you were afraid of the noisy games of the boys and preferred the society of your little sister. I do not imagine that violent sports ever tempted you, or that you ever became skilful in them. Nevertheless, you learned to hunt very large game. As soon as you learned to read, your curiosity was excited by those books of popular science which have replaced fairy stories in realistic schemes of education. You found extreme pleasure in them, and you experienced a grandiose horror in witnessing cosmic upheavals and battling with antediluvian animals. It was formerly the fashion to run after Prince Charming and awaken Sleeping Beauties. Now the child is no longer expected to make the acquaintance of those trivial personages; he must content himself with those whose skeletons have been discovered. Let me ask you: Between creatures which have really lived and of which we know nothing and never shall know anything, except that they lived, and beings which have lived only in the dreams of humanity, but which in the course of the ages have gratified us with so much beauty, grace and poetry, which are the more real, which bring more of light, of consolation, of joy? But you were not made to sit in the arm-chair of Charles Perrault.

It was in your father's house that you received from a retired teacher, a friend of your family, your first notions of things; he did not require written exercises from you; he conversed with you, talking of everything at haphazard; this encyclopedic instruction was so appropriate to your nature that when you entered the collège you at once took the first place; but this sort of work would be injurious to children of different endowment. Your memory was and still is more auditory than visual. Pronounced words engrave themselves on it. When you come back from a journey, no matter how long, you can recite the names of all the stations you have passed, if you heard them cried before your car. More than this—a character presents itself to your mind like a sound. In the evening, you can recite the numbers of