This, we doubt not, was one of the designs of Providence, in the bestowment of Zerah Colburn's wonderful gifts. But their use should not be confined to an individual case. If there is argument for God in a flower, how much more in a child of Zerah Colburn's endowments? What infidelity can withstand such an instance, and still say, there is no God? And farther, let us reflect upon the noble powers of the mind, and rejoice, yet with fear and trembling, that we are possessors of an inheritance, which, at God's bidding, is capable of such mighty expansion.
The history of Zerah Colburn may teach us one thing more—that the gifts of genius are not always sources of happiness to the possessor; that mental affluence, like worldly riches, often brings sorrow, rather than peace to the possessor; and that moderate natural gifts, well cultivated, are generally the most useful in society, and most conducive to the happiness of the possessor.
Zerah Colburn, at eight years of age.
BARATIERE.
John Philip Baratiere was a most extraordinary instance of the early and rapid exertion of mental faculties. He was the son of Francis Baratiere, minister of the French church at Schwoback, near Nuremberg, where he was born, January 10, 1721. The French was his mother tongue, and German was the language of the people around him. His father talked to him in Latin, and with this he became familiar; so that, without knowing the rules of grammar, he, at four years of age, talked French to his mother, Latin to his father, and High Dutch to the servants and neighboring children, without mixing or confounding the respective languages.
About the middle of his fifth year, he acquired a knowledge of the Greek: so that in fifteen months he perfectly understood all the Greek books in the Old and New Testament, which he translated into Latin. When five years and eight months old, he entered upon Hebrew; and in three years more, was so expert in the Hebrew text, that, from a Bible without points, he could give the sense of the original in Latin or French, or translate, extempore, the Latin or French versions into Hebrew. He composed a dictionary of rare and difficult Hebrew words; and about his tenth year, amused himself, for twelve months, with the rabbinical writers.
He now obtained a knowledge of the Chaldaic, Syriac and Arabic; and acquired a taste for divinity and ecclesiastical antiquity, by studying the Greek fathers of the first four ages of the church. In the midst of these occupations, a pair of globes coming into his possession, he could, in eight or ten days, resolve all the problems upon them; and in January, 1735, at the age of fourteen, he devised his project for the discovery of the longitude, which he communicated to the Royal Society of London, and the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin!