rew their whole force into a single study, he felt
himself attracted equally by the entire circle of Nature, and thought
omniscience a nobler object of ambition than any one science. He
admitted that the search after all knowledge is incompatible with
eminence in any particular department; but he believed that it affords
higher pleasure to the mind, and confers ability to do signal service
to mankind in pointing out the grand connections, the general laws, of
Nature.

It is not, perhaps, widely known, that Percival was a well-informed
botanist. He studied this branch when a medical student under Professor
Ives, and assisted his instructor in laying out a small botanical
garden, the plants of which were arranged after the natural orders of
Jussieu. Soon after finishing his medical education, he gave a course of
lectures on botany in Charleston, South Carolina, before a very select
audience, composed mostly of Ladies. The only drawback to the lecturer's
success was his excessive timidity. As an evidence of the assiduity with
which he botanized, it may be mentioned that he had seen the _Geranium
Robertianum_ (a plant which nestles in the sunny clefts of our trap
mountains) in bloom, during every month of the year. One year he found
its blossoms in December, another in January, and so on, until the round
of the monthly calendar was completed.

Percival was an earnest advocate of popular education. He manifested
much interest in the first systematic attempt (at the instance of
Mr. James Brewster) to furnish the people of New Haven with popular
instruction in the form of lectures. At a public dinner, given by Mr.
Brewster, on the occasion of opening the building in which rooms had
been fitted up for these lectures, the late Mr. Skinner gave the toast,
"Our mechanics, the right arm of New Haven," and Percival followed with,
"Science, the right eye which directs the right arm of New Haven." He
believed most fully in the superiority of intelligent labor. He pointed
out cases in which a college-training had been connected with signal
eminence in mechanical invention, and said, that, according to his
observations, persons engaged in industrial pursuits usually succeeded
in proportion to the thoroughness of their education.

Percival himself gave a course of lectures, or rather, lessons, in New
Haven,--not in the building above mentioned, for his natural timidity
was too great to encounter a public audience, but in the theologica