Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/252

242 "his beetles," but his scientific taste was already the ruling genius of his life. It is surprising to see how completely he remained untouched by the ordinary influences of a university training; he thought in later years that his scholastic education had been a waste of time, and he seems justified when one perceives how little good he got from it. His was a mind that belonged to himself, self-fed, almost self-made; he lived his own life, and not another's, from the start; though his taste for collecting was hereditary, the persistence with which he gave himself up to following it, the completeness of his surrender to his one predominant talent, was his own. He was, nevertheless, better furnished with intellectual power than he appears to have believed. "From my earliest youth," he writes, "I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed, that is, to group all facts under some general laws." It is true that he started from some specific facts, had a definite, tangible problem to solve; but he felt the necessity to solve it. He differed from the collector in this, that his curiosity was not exhausted in gathering materials, but he must also order his materials; or to