HABITS-HOW ACQUIRED.

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Let us take care that the habits to which, as boys, we surrender ourselves, are not habits which, as men, we shall be ashamed of. As the snow accumulates, says Jeremy Bentham, so are our habits formed. No single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change; no single action creates, however it may exhibit, a man's character; but as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain, and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting upon the elements of mischief, which pernicious habits have brought together by imperceptible accumulation, may overthrow the edifice of truth and virtue. Remember, the Boy, for good as well as for evil, makes the Man.

"In every man there is a magnet; in that thing which the man
can do best, there is a loadstone."

"This above all,-To thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to ahy man."

"

SHAKSPEARE.

N no sense, perhaps, is it more true that the Boy makes the Man than in the bias of his youthful genius. The

future Mozart, Landseer, or Faraday, shows himself-reveals his talents and inclinations-in his earliest years, and Benjamin West sketching portraits of his baby-sister in her cradle foreshadows the man who shall immortalize the death of Wolfe. Few artists, for instance, have been born in circumstances favourable to the development of the artistic faculty; their genius has struggled to the light in spite of

"Sketching portraits of his baby-sister in her cradle. "-Page 58.

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every difficulty, disapproval.

BLAISE PASCAL.

poverty, sickness, parental Through the clay and the rock the fountain bubbles up into the sunshine. Thus, says a recent writer, Gainsborough and Bacon were the sons of cloth-workers, Barry was an Irish sailor-boy, and Maclise a banker's apprentice at Cork; Opie and Romney, like Inigo Jones, were carpenters; West was the son of a small Quaker farmer in Pennsylvania; Northcote was a watchmaker, Jackson a tailor, and Etty a printer; Reynolds, Wilson, and Wilkie, were the sons of clergymen; Lawrence was the son of a publican, and Turner of a barber.

Our readers will have heard of Blaise Pascal, the eminent French mathematician, and author of those famous Lettres Provinciales which so powerfully exposed the corruptions of the Jesuit order. He was born at Clermont, in the province of Auvergne in France, on the 19th of June, 1623. His father, Stephen Pascal, held an important official appointment as President of the Court of Aids in Auvergne. When he was only three years of age he lost his mother, and his father then resolved to retire from public life, and wholly devote himself to his son's education. But he neglected the heart while

A MATHEMATICAL AMATEUR.

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cultivating the mind, and being himself addicted to scientific pursuits, rejoiced in the proofs which young Pascal gave of precocious talent. Having surrendered his office in Auvergne to a brother, he removed to Paris. when Blaise was in his eighth year, and continuing his sole teacher, fostered with the utmost care his nascent genius. He carefully kept back, however, every indication of his partiality for mathematical studies, and directed his attention rather to the general discipline of his mind than to the fostering of any particular tendency. But genius will not be denied, and though all mathematical books were rigidly excluded from his studies, the peculiar bias of Pascal's mind speedily developed itself. He implored his father to teach him mathematics; he dreamed of circles, triangles, and parallelograms; and when his father persisted in his opposition, he resolved to master the science by his own unaided labours. Shutting himself up in his play-room, he began a series of rude but marvellous experiments, to assist him in his investigations. He covered the floor with figures drawn in charcoal; squares, circles, triangles, cubes, cones, and other mathematical forms. He did not know even the name for a circle,