In his sixteenth year, our hero--for every biographer must have a hero--was removed from school to his father's office, where he was engaged in the uncongenial task of copying dreary legal folios, and acquiring as much knowledge of law as might fit him for an attorney's profession. As Mr. Smeaton had a good connection in Leeds, he not unnaturally wished his son to profit by it; but the future engineer revolted from "Blackstone's Commentaries" and "Coke upon Littleton;" and though, like a good son, he attended assiduously to his office duties, every day he found the burden of a detested occupation heavier to bear. Towards the end of 1742, partly with the view of furthering his professional duties, and partly for the sake of taking him away from his all-engrossing mechanical pursuits, Mr. Smeaton sent him to London. Here he made a vigorous attempt to subdue his tastes to his father's wishes; but utterly failing, he wrote to him an earnest appeal for permission to follow what was clearly an unconquerable bias. With equal kindness and wisdom, his father consented, and young Smeaton immediately entered the service of a philosophical instrument-maker. He applied himself to his new vocation with such admirable energy, and it was so entirely fitted to the measure of his talents, that in a very short time he was able to relieve his father from all expenses connected with his maintenance. [Sidenote: Rising in life.] It is not to be supposed that a young man with so much strength of purpose and clearness of intellect would devote himself only to the mechanical part of his profession. He read industriously and methodically, so as to obtain a knowledge of the principles of theoretical science; he sought the society of educated men; he regularly attended the meetings and lectures of the Royal Society. He started in business on his own account in 1750, when he was only twenty-six; and in the same year he read a paper before the Royal Society on certain improvements effected by himself and Dr. Knight in the mariner's compass. In 1751 he invented a machine to measure a ship's way at sea, and experimented with it in a voyage down the Thames, and in a short cruise on board the _Fortune_ sloop-of-war. [Sidenote: Work and method.]