Excerpt from Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Twenty American Authors His love of natural history, which showed itself in his childish sports and made him a miniature collector, deep ened as his mind matured, and gave him so strong a bent toward university life that he persuaded his parents to post pone their design to establish him in commercial pursuit until he should first spend two additional years at the College of Lausanne. His devotion there to anatomy and kindred studies gave the slight weight that was needed to turn the scale, and at the end of his course he went to the medical school of Zurich, and thence to Heidelberg. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.