Among my first books was a volume of a hopelessly unscientific kind by Mayne Reid, about mammals, illustrated with pictures no more artistic than but quite as thrilling as those in the typical school geography.  When my father found how deeply interested I was in this not very accurate volume, he gave me a little book by J. G. Wood, the English writer of popular books on natural history, and then a larger one of his called “Homes Without Hands.”  Both of these were cherished possessions.  They were studied eagerly; and they finally descended to my children.  The “Homes Without Hands,” by the way, grew to have an added association in connection with a pedagogical failure on my part.  In accordance with what I believed was some kind of modern theory of making education interesting and not letting it become a task, I endeavored to teach my eldest small boy one or two of his letters from the title-page.  As the letter “H” appeared in the title an unusual number of times, I selected that to begin on, my effort being to keep the small boy interested, not to let him realize that he was learning a lesson, and to convince him that he was merely having a good time.  Whether it was the theory or my method of applying it that was defective I do not know, but I certainly absolutely eradicated from his brain any ability to learn what “H” was; and long after he had learned all the other letters of the alphabet in the old-fashioned way, he proved wholly unable to remember “H” under any circumstances.

Quite unknown to myself, I was, while a boy, under a hopeless disadvantage in studying nature.  I was very near-sighted, so that the only things I could study were those I ran against or stumbled over.  When I was about thirteen I was allowed to take lessons in taxidermy from a Mr. Bell, a tall, clean-shaven, white-haired old gentleman, as straight as an Indian, who had been a companion of Audubon’s.  He had a musty little shop, somewhat on the order of Mr. Venus’s shop in “Our Mutual Friend,” a little shop in which he had done very valuable work for science.  This “vocational study,” as I suppose it would be called by modern educators, spurred and directed my interest in collecting specimens for mounting and preservation.  It was this summer that I got my first gun, and it puzzled me to find that my companions seemed to see things to shoot at which I could not see at all.  One day they read aloud an advertisement in huge letters on a distant billboard, and I then realized that something was the matter, for not only was I unable to read the sign but I could not even see the letters.  I spoke of this to my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles, which literally opened an entirely new world to me.  I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.  I had been a clumsy and awkward little boy, and while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.  The recollection of this experience gives me a keen sympathy with those who are trying in our public schools and elsewhere to remove the physical causes of deficiency in children, who are often unjustly blamed for being obstinate or unambitious, or mentally stupid.