Читать книгу The Story of a Working Man's Life - Francis Mason - Страница 12

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OFTEN when a little boy, I had heard of astronomers measuring the distances of the sun, moon and stars, but I did not understand how it could be possible, and with the great mass of the common people, I thought it a much more unlikely story than anything in the Arabian Nights. That the doctors made castor oil out of dead bodies was credible enough, but that the star-gazers could make anything out of the moon was not to be believed.

One day in turning over the books on an old book-stall in Hull, I hit upon a large geography, which in the introduction undertook to explain how the distances of the heavenly bodies were measured. I read enough to become deeply interested, and when I got home, I went to my mother, who was always my sympathizing confidant, told her of the discovery, and begged of her to buy it for me. We were poor, and she had not the money then, but like a true mother, though feeling no interest in the matter herself, in a week or two she contrived to furnish me with the price, and the book was bought.

I purchased the book merely for the introduction, and it was a good bargain, for those few pages made me a mathematician. They taught in the simplest manner possible, how an object off the road varies its position as we move along the road, and that these angles being measured, and the space traveled over known, the distance of the object can be calculated. The application was then made to the moon and planets as seen from the earth, and it became as clear as a sunbeam, that the distances of the heavenly bodies could be measured. I was greatly delighted with the discovery. It was like finding a nugget of gold. And when I read on that the science which taught this art was called "trigonometry," I determined at once, cost what it would, to learn trigonometry.

I had never met the word before, and none of the theologians and politicians who frequented our house knew any more about it than I did, but after many inquiries, I found there was a select night school of six or eight pupils taught by a retired naval officer, who was reported the best mathematician in town; so I persuaded my father to allow me to go to this night school and to pay my school fees.

All having been arranged, one evening without any introduction, I walked into the old gentleman's library where he taught, and asked if he had room for another pupil in trigonometry. He smiled, pulled off his spectacles, and leaning back in his arm-chair, gazed intently on me for a minute or two, as I stood before him. At last he relieved me of his piercing eyes, and said: "Yes, take a chair."

He immediately took down from his book-shelves Simson's Euclid, with the remark: "Do you want to understand principles? I can teach you trigonometry at once, but you will not understand the principles on which the calculations are based. If you study that book, and then take up trigonometry, you will understand the reasons of the rules with which you work. Now which course do you prefer to pursue?" "Geometry then shall be my first study," I replied, "because I want to know, first of all, the reasons of things."

I took up the study of Euclid, which he lent me, and no book before or since, excepting the Bible, have I read with such a deep interest as Euclid. After being started, I went through it with as much zest as a fashionable young lady goes through the last new novel.

Of the thoroughness with which I mastered the book, an incident which occurred at Newton Theological Seminary many years afterwards gave proof. One of the students who had come from Brown University, pointed out to me a theorem in Legendre, which he said none of his class, nor even the professor himself, understood. When they came to it in course, the professor said: "You understand this, you can pass on to the next." All the class assented until my informant ventured to say that he did not, and then it turned out that there was not a man in the class that understood any more of it than himself. The professor looked at it a while, and remarked: "It is not very apparent, we will look at it again to-morrow." On the morrow, the professor said: "Well, gentlemen, I do not exactly understand this theorem, but nothing depends on it, you may pass it over."

When I looked at the theorem, I recognized it at once as one I had met and mastered in Euclid; but it was on solid geometry, and without keeping in mind what had gone before, could not be easily understood. The difficulty lay in not being well grounded in the previous theorems on which this depended. Professors it is believed are generally well qualified for their professorships, but there are now and then some who obtain their appointments from some popular qualifications, or other causes rather than learning. On remarking that a man who had been appointed to a professorship did not understand the branch to which he had been appointed: "Oh, it is supposed," was the reply, "that he will qualify himself for his appointment."

There is a good deal of this pasteboard learning out of college. I knew a school teacher in England, who sent forth an immaculate card, on which he undertook, among other things, to teach Latin and Greek; but on having occasion to test his Latin, I found he knew next to nothing of the language.

When I taught a select school in Randolph, Massachusetts, one of my pupils had taught a town school the winter before in the neighborhood, and he came to me to perfect himself in grammar. I found he could not parse a simple sentence, although he had passed a school committee as qualified to teach grammar, and had taught it in his school the year before. I said to him: "You do not understand anything of grammar, how is it possible you passed the examination of the school committee?" "Easy enough," he coolly replied, "for they did not understand any more of grammar than I did."

The night school is an institution that deserves to be used for the benefit of working boys and girls much more than it is. Were the necessary facilities offered, multitudes might be rescued by it from a vicious life, to enter on the study of useful learning, that will not be attracted by religious institutions; but, "the destruction of the poor is their poverty." Learning cannot be prosecuted even at an evening school without abstracting from the hours of labor. There are also text-books to be purchased, which in the aggregate amount to a formidable sum to a poor youth who has nothing. I never felt so thankful for help in my whole life, as I did for a guinea that my aunt unsolicited and unexpectedly sent me to buy books, when I had not the means to purchase a Euclid.

In three years I mastered geometry, trigonometry, plane and spherical, and algebra with their applications to navigation, astronomy, optics and mechanics. During all that time my studies were to me more than my daily food. I did not heed what I ate, what I wore, or what people thought of me.

Occasionally I returned from school after nine o'clock, and sat down to study again at home, which was continued till the church clock struck two in the morning. Seven o'clock found me on the shoe-bench again, and there I sat drudging and thinking, with brief intervals for my meals, until seven o'clock in the evening came round and I hurried off to school once more, glad as a child let out to play.

During the later part of my studies, one of the newspapers in Hull devoted a corner to curious mathematical questions and answers, and my teacher was the mathematical editor. I soon became a contributor.

One day three questions appeared in the paper, and my teacher meeting father, remarked to him in relation to them: "Your son may do the first, try the second, but let the third alone." When my father came home and told me, I went to work that night on the third question, that I was to "let alone," and did it before I slept. The next night I did the second, but I let the first alone in silent contempt.

The third question was one of those diophantine problems in algebra, which the books say, "are of considerable difficulty, and require more than ordinary skill and judgment for their solution."

My answer to this question was printed in the newspaper in full, and when the teacher met my father the next time, he said: "You ought to give your son an opportunity for study. He has a mind for science." And so have thousands of others who never win the laurel, but are ranked with stupid boors, incapable of intellectual advancement. Poor fellows! I have them on my heart always. They had no mothers to help them up the first step into the temple of science by the purchase of a book, no fathers to lend them a hand by supporting them in high school, no aunts to buy them text-books; and that makes all the difference between an educated man and a dunce.

Would that I were rich! I would establish good night schools for hard working boys and girls in every poor neighborhood, and furnish them liberally with text-books for the pupils, and provide tried teachers, tried in patience and kindness, as well as in scholarship. How much good a man who has wealth may accomplish! He may change with his dollars the whole face of society, dig up the roots of ignorance, and plant the fruit-bearing trees of knowledge in their place; and that, too, in the most unpromising soils. No doubt but my school-master in York regarded me as a dunce, and all my Sabbath-school teachers set me down as incorrigible; but I was no such thing, I was merely uninterested in the studies they set before me.