Many were the lines of thought that Thomas Hill opened out before his children. “At an early age,” said his son, “we were all fond of reading, had a strong desire for knowledge, and became studious, assisting one another, and obtaining, when required, effectual help from my father.” Though he was ready enough to help his children, yet he did not himself set them to study. “I had an excellent understanding for mathematics,” his son said, “and my father had a great liking for them, with a fair knowledge of them, yet he did not teach me them.” That is to say, he did not teach them formally and by book. When he was out walking he would work out problems in geometry for his sons, now and then stopping to describe figures with his walking-stick on the dust of the road. It was not till Rowland Hill was twenty-five years old, that he went through Euclid. He had, indeed, some slight acquaintance with the three first books, but even these he knew very imperfectly. One Christmas holidays he gave up all his spare time to Euclid, and made himself master of the whole of it before school opened. Yet five years earlier than this I find the following record in his Journal:— “It is frequently the case that when walking by myself I make calculations, or invent demonstrations of rules in Mensuration or Trigonometry to beguile away the time, and I find nothing else so effectual. I lately made a calculation in my mind, to determine the distance of a fixed star, supposing its annual parallax to be one second; and, for the sake of round numbers, I took the diameter of the Earth’s orbit at two hundred millions of miles. I forget what was the result of the calculation, but I know that it was many billions of miles. Some time ago, as I was walking to Smethwick, I was making some calculations respecting the capacity of the boiler of a steam-engine, which it was my intention to make, and for some reason or other I wished to find the diagonal of a cube of certain dimensions. Never having seen any rule to accomplish this, I set about to find one; which I soon did.” Earlier even than this, when he was but seventeen, his friend Mr. Beasley, the Stourbridge schoolmaster, asked him to give lessons in Navigation to a young midshipman, who had come to live with him as his pupil.