When the versatile Lord Avebury, who became one of the greatest modern students of the powers of ants and other social insects, was four years old, his mother made this record in her diary: "His great delight is in insects. Butterflies, Caterpillars or Beetles are great treasures, and he is watching a large spider outside my window most anxiously." The same boy at eight, when writing home from school, added this postscript to a letter: "I am a favorite with most of the boys because I do not care about being laughed." The boy who has a good inheritance, follows his own bent, and does "not care about being laughed," may be on the road to success and with talents may achieve distinction. John James Audubon was one of those boys, although his path was never strewn with the roses that many have imagined. The naturalist tells us that his father hoped that he would follow in his footsteps, or else become an engineer, and he saw that his son was instructed in the elements of mathematics, geography, fencing and music. But as Lieutenant Audubon was continually on the move, supervision in those matters fell to the over-indulgent stepmother, with the result that, instead of doing his duties at school, young Audubon took to the fields. Every night, he said, he would return with his lunch basket well laden with the spoils of the day—birds' nests, eggs, and curiosities of every sort destined for the museum into which his room had already been transformed. He was then in the "collecting stage," when that sense of possession dominates the heart of the boy, which, if well directed, can be turned to excellent account. Lieutenant Audubon encouraged his son's taste for natural history and for drawing, but did not regard such accomplishments as a substitute for what he considered more serious subjects. He himself had suffered too much from lack of a formal education and was resolved to give his children the best opportunities within their reach. "Revolutions," he once remarked, according to his son, "were not confined to society, but could also take place in the lives of individuals," when they were all "too apt to lose in one day the fortune they had before possessed; but talents and knowledge, added to sound mental training, assisted by honest industry," could "never fail, nor be taken from any one when once the possessor of such valuable means."