y the moral law and
social evils will disappear. Its reading was accompanied by some
qualms of conscience, arising from the non-accordance of many of its
tenets with those of the "Catechism" and the "New England Primer."
The combination of the two, however, led to the optimistic feeling
that all wrongs would be righted, every act of injustice punished,
and truth and righteousness eventually triumph through the regular
processes of Nature and Society. I have been led to abandon this
doctrine only by much experience, some of which will be found in
the following pages.

In the direction of mathematical and physical science and reading
generally, I may add something to what I have quoted from my
father. My grandfather Simon had a small collection of books in
the family. Among those purely literary were several volumes of "The
Spectator" and "Roderick Random." Of the former I read a good deal.
The latter was a story which a boy who had scarcely read any other
would naturally follow with interest. Two circumstances connected
with the reading, one negative and the other positive, I recall.
Looking into the book after attaining years of maturity, I found it
to contain many incidents of a character that would not be admitted
into a modern work. Yet I read it through without ever noticing
or retaining any impression of the indelicate side of the story.
The other impression was a feeling of horror that a man fighting a
duel and finding himself, as he supposed, mortally wounded by his
opponent, should occupy his mind with avenging his own death instead
of making his peace with Heaven.

Three mathematical books were in the collection, Hammond's Algebra,
Simpson's Euclid, and Moore's Navigator, the latter the predecessor
of Bowditch. The first was a miserable book, and I think its methods,
which were crude in the extreme, though not incorrect, were rather
more harmful than beneficial. The queer diagrams in Euclid had in
my early years so little attraction for me that my curiosity never
led me to examine its text. I at length did so in consequence of a
passage in the algebra which referred to the 47th proposition of the
First Book. It occurred to me to look into the book and see what
this was. It was the first conception of mathematical proof that
I had ever met with. I saw that the demonstration referred to a
previous proposition, went back to that, and so on to the beginning.
A new world of thought seemed to be opene