André Marie Ampère was born at Lyons, January 22d, 1775. His father, Jean Jacques Ampère, was a small merchant who made a comfortable living for his family, but no more. His father and mother were both well informed for their class and time, and were well esteemed by their neighbors. His mother especially was known for an unalterable sweetness of character and charitable beneficence which sought out every possible occasion for its exercise. She was universally beloved by those who knew her, and the charm of Ampère's manner, which made for him a friend of every acquaintance, was undoubtedly a manifestation of the same family strain. Shortly after the birth of their son, the parents gave up business and retired on a little property situated in the country not far from Lyons. It was in this little village, without any school-teacher and with only home instruction, that the genius of the future savant, who was to be one of the distinguished scientific men of the nineteenth century, began to show itself. For Ampère was not only a genius, but, what is so often thought to be an almost absolute preclusion of any serious achievement later in life, a precocious genius. The first marvelous faculty that began to develop in him was an uncontrollable tendency to arithmetical expression. Before he knew how to make figures, he had invented for himself a method of doing even rather complicated problems in arithmetic by the aid of a number of pebbles or peas. During an illness that overtook him as a child, his mother, anxious because of the possible evil effects upon his health of mental work, took his pebbles away from him. He supplied their place, however, during the leisure hours of his convalescence, when time hung heavy on his child hands, by bread crumbs. He craved food, but, according to the "starving" medical _régime_ of the time, he was allowed only a single biscuit in three days. It required no little self-sacrifice on his part, then, to supply himself with counters from this scanty supply, and his persistence, in spite of hunger, evidently indicates that this mathematical tendency was stronger than his appetite for food. This is all the more surprising, since children are usually scarcely more than little animals in the matter of eating, and commonly satisfy their physical cravings without an after-thought of any kind.