And, continuing to win laurels, at the close of the next session they took the first and second places as prize-men in natural philosophy, while William the following year gained the class prize in astronomy, and was awarded a university medal for an essay, “On the Figure of the Earth,” the manuscript of which, a carefully bound volume of eighty-five pages, is still in existence. He was then not sixteen years old. Of course there were not lacking wiseacres who dolefully predicted all manner of unpleasant things for these “unhappy victims of a father’s folly,” who must inevitably fade into an early grave. But the father only smiled serenely, confident that the future would vindicate his educational innovation. And, of a surety, the future did. For James Thomson, the older of the two, living to the age of seventy, left behind him the reputation of one of England’s leading authorities on engineering; while William, who did not die until he was eighty-three, became even more famous, winning, as Lord Kelvin of Largs, a place in the annals of science fairly comparable with that held by the immortal Newton. A similar process of intensive child culture was carried out, with similarly happy results, in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose father modelled his whole upbringing in accordance with the theory that the mind, like the body, grows with exercise, and that the sooner the process of exercising and training it begins, the better the child’s prospects for a worthy and efficient manhood. Like James Thomson the elder Mill was an exceedingly busy man, but this did not prevent him from making the intellectual development of his son a matter of patient, personal attention. Almost as soon as the little John could talk, his formal education began, and throughout his childhood was continued along lines that have provoked indignant comment in many quarters. “I have no remembrance,” he tells us, in his interesting “Autobiography,” “of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I learned no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ the first Greek book which I read. The ‘Anabasis,’ which I remember better, was the second. I learned no Latin until my eighth year.