Page:William Petty - Economic Writings (1899) vol 1.djvu/22

xiv was overtaken by an accident which gave him opportunity to turn his precocity to good account. After some ten months' service as cabin boy on an English merchantman, he had the misfortune to break his leg. Hereupon the crew set him ashore on the French coast, not far from Caen. The unhappy lad, thus left to shift for himself, recounted his misfortunes in Latin so excellent that the Jesuit fathers of that city not only cared for him but straightway admitted him a pupil of their college. Here he prosecuted his former studies and incidentally learned the French language as well. Meanwhile he supported himself in part by teaching navigation to a French officer and English to a gentleman who desired to visit England—Latin serving, apparently, as the medium of communication in both cases—and in part by traffic in "pittiful brass things with cool'd glasse in them instead of diamonds and rubies." Upon his return to England he appears to have spent some months in the Royal Navy, but in 1643, "when the civil war betwixt the King and Parliament grew hot," he joined the army of English refugees in the Netherlands and "vigorously followed his studies, especially that of medicine," at Utrecht, Leyden and Amsterdam. By November, 1645, he had made his way to Paris where he continued his anatomical studies, reading Vesalius with Hobbes and forming many acquaintances in the group of scholars that gathered around Father Mersen and the Marquis of Newcastle. In the following year he returned to Romsey, and appears to have taken up for a time the business formerly carried on by his father. At Romsey he busied himself also with an instrument for double writing, which he had so far completed by March, 1647, that a patent upon it was then granted him for a term of seventeen years. In November, if not earlier, he went to London with the intention of selling this device. His expectations were not realized, and it may be inferred from his subsequent remarks upon patent monopolies that his career as an inventor proved far from gainful. In London Petty was "admitted