special use of astronomy is that it enables us to draw conclusions from the
movements in the celestial regions as to human fate." He labored on his island
twenty years. He was always versifying, and inscribed a poem over the entrance
of his underground observatory expressing the astonishment of Urania at finding
in the interior of the earth a cavern devoted to the study of the heavens.
Galileo[17] was born in 1564 of a Florentine noble, who was poor. As a youth
he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting himself to painting, but
when he was seventeen studied medicine, and at the University of Pisa fell in
love with mathematics.
Isaac Newton,[18] born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a very low
piece in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at sixteen tried farming. In
one of his university examinations in Euclid be did so poorly as to incur special
censure. His first incentive to diligent study came from being severely kicked by
a high class boy. He then resolved to pass him in studies, and soon rose to the
head of the school. He made many ingenious toys and windmills; a carriage, the
wheels of which were driven by the hands of the occupants, and a clock which
moved by water; curtains, kites, lanterns, etc.; and before he was fourteen fell in
love with Miss Storey, several yeas older than himself. He entered Trinity
College at Cambridge at eighteen.
William Herschel, born in 1738, at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, when
he was eighteen, was a performer in the regimental band, and after a battle
passed a night in a ditch and escaped in disguise, to England, where he eked out
a precarious livelihood by teaching music. He supported himself until middle
age as an organist. In much of his later work he was greatly aided by his sister
Caroline. When he discovered a sixth planet he became famous, and devoted
himself exclusively to astronomy, training his only son to follow in his footsteps,
and dying in 1822.
Agassiz[19] at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. He memorized
Latin names, of which he accumulated "great volumes of MSS.", and "modestly
expressed the hope that in time he might be able to give the name of every
known animal." At fourteen he revolted at mercantile life, for which he was
designed, and issued a manifesto planning to spend four years at a Cermem
university, then in Paris, when he could begin to write. Rooks were scarce, and a
little later he copied, with the aid of his brother, several large volumes, and had
fifty live birds in his room at one time.