Facts of this decisive character are abundant.  See the boy NANTEUIL biding himself in a tree to pursue the delightful exercise of his pencil, while his parents are averse to their son practising his young art!  See HANDEL, intended for a doctor of the civil laws, and whom no parental discouragement could deprive of his enthusiasm, for ever touching harpsichords, and having secretly conveyed a musical instrument to a retired apartment, listen to him when, sitting through the night, he awakens his harmonious spirit!  Observe FERGUSON, the child of a peasant, acquiring the art of reading without any one suspecting it, by listening to his father teaching his brother; observe him 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