ted to what
had become the vital want of a man who drew air in a world of his own.
This was the first thing to be provided for; and Science was of more
imperative necessity than even Hunger.

Adam Warner was indeed a creature of remarkable genius,--and genius, in
an age where it is not appreciated, is the greatest curse the iron Fates
can inflict on man. If not wholly without the fond fancies which led the
wisdom of the darker ages to the philosopher's stone and the elixir, he
had been deterred from the chase of a chimera by want of means to pursue
it! for it required the resources or the patronage of a prince or noble
to obtain the costly ingredients consumed in the alchemist's crucible.
In early life, therefore, and while yet in possession of a competence
derived from a line of distinguished and knightly ancestors, Adam
Warner had devoted himself to the surer and less costly study of the
mathematics, which then had begun to attract the attention of the
learned, but which was still looked upon by the vulgar as a branch
of the black art. This pursuit had opened to him the insight into
discoveries equally useful and sublime. They necessitated a still more
various knowledge; and in an age when there was no division of labour
and rare and precarious communication among students, it became
necessary for each discoverer to acquire sufficient science for his own
collateral experiments.

In applying mathematics to the practical purposes of life, in
recognizing its mighty utilities to commerce and civilization, Adam
Warner was driven to conjoin with it, not only an extensive knowledge
of languages, but many of the rudest tasks of the mechanist's art;
and chemistry was, in some of his researches, summoned to his aid.
By degrees, the tyranny that a man's genius exercises over his life,
abstracted him from all external objects. He had loved his wife
tenderly, but his rapid waste of his fortune in the purchase of
instruments and books, then enormously dear, and the neglect of all
things not centred in the hope to be the benefactor of the world, had
ruined her health and broken her heart. Happily Warner perceived not her
decay till just before her death; happily he never conceived its cause,
for her soul was wrapped in his. She revered, and loved, and never
upbraided him. Her heart was the martyr to his mind. Had she foreseen
the future destinies of her daughter, it might have been otherwise. She
could have remonstrated with the f