Dr. Mateer himself regarded his efficiency in this sphere as due in some measure to native endowment. He had an inborn taste and ability for that sort of work; and stories have come down concerning certain very early manifestations of this characteristic. It is related that when he was a little boy he was suffering loss through the raids made by the woodpeckers on a cherry tree laden with luscious fruit. He pondered the situation carefully, and then set up a pole, close by, with a nice lodging place for a bird at the top, and armed himself with a mallet down at the foot. The woodpecker would grab a cherry, and immediately fly to the pole in order to eat it; but a sharp blow with the mallet would bring him from his perch to the ground. So the boy saved his cherries. It is also related of him that when a mere boy he had a friendly dispute with his father over the question whether a sucking pig had the homing instinct. He maintained that it would return to its mother under conditions that proved the affirmative; and in order to satisfy himself, he placed a pig in a sack, and took it a long way from its familiar haunts, and turned it loose. It had been agreed that the result was to decide the ownership. To his delight, immediately the pig started on a bee line for home, and never gave up the race until it was back in its old place. For the development and application of this natural gift he received almost no help from others. Probably if that old workbench in the barn at the “Hermitage” could speak, it might tell something as to oversight and guidance of the boy by his father, in making and repairing traps and tools for use in recreation and in work; but beyond this he had no instruction. In his day at college a chemical or physical laboratory was supposed to be exclusively for the professor to prepare his experiments; the student was expected only to be a spectator in the classroom when the experiments were shown. The man who occupied the chair of natural philosophy at Jefferson when we were there had a gift for supplementing his scanty outfit of apparatus with the products of his own skill and labor, and if the student Mateer had found his way down into the subterranean regions where these were wrought, he and Professor Jones would have rejoiced together in sympathetic collaboration; but no such unheard-of violation of ancient custom occurred. In the academy at Beaver he first turned his hand to making a few pieces of apparatus which he craved as helps in teaching. But it was not until he reached China that this field for his talent opened before him, and continued to enlarge all the rest of his life. In fact, even when he was absent from China, on his furloughs, he did not get away from his work with apparatus and machinery. During one of his earlier furloughs, while he was looking up everything that could be helpful to his Chinese boys, he spent some time in the Baldwin Locomotive Works, by special permission, in studying the