making a wooden watch
without the slightest knowledge of mechanism; and while a shepherd,
studying, like an ancient Chaldean, the phenomena of the heavens, on a
celestial globe formed by his own hand. That great mechanic, SMEATON, when
a child, disdained the ordinary playthings of his age; he collected the
tools of workmen, observed them at their work, and asked questions till he
could work himself. One day, having watched some millwrights, the child
was shortly after, to the distress of the family, discovered in a
situation of extreme danger, fixing up at the top of a barn a rude
windmill. Many circumstances of this nature occurred before his sixth
year. His father, an attorney, sent him up to London to be brought up to
the same profession; but he declared that "the study of the law did not
suit the _bent of his genius_"--a term he frequently used. He addressed a
strong memorial to his father, to show his utter incompetency to study
law; and the good sense of the father abandoned Smeaton "to the bent of
his genius in his own way." Such is the history of the man who raised the
Eddystone Lighthouse, in the midst of the waves, like the rock on which it
stands.

Can we hesitate to believe that in such minds there was a resistless and
mysterious propensity, "growing with the growth" of these youths, who seem
to have been placed out of the influence of that casual excitement, or any
other of those sources of genius, so frequently assigned for its
production?

Yet these cases are not more striking than one related of the Abbe LA
CAILLE, who ranked among the first astronomers of the age. La Caille was
the son of the parish clerk of a village. At the age of ten years his
father sent him every evening to ring the church bell, but the boy always
returned home late: his father was angry, and beat him, and still the boy
returned an hour after he had rung the bell. The father, suspecting
something mysterious in his conduct, one evening watched him. He saw his
son ascend the steeple, ring the bell as usual, and remain there during an
hour. When the unlucky boy descended, he trembled like one caught in the
fact, and on his knees confessed that the pleasure he took in watching the
stars from the steeple was the real cause which detained him from home. As
the father was not born to be an astronomer, he flogged his son severely.
The youth was found weeping in the streets by a man of science, who, when
he discovered in a boy of ten year