EARLY AND COMMERCIAL LIFE: 1822 TO 1866.

If I begin this book with my autobiography, it is not from any feeling of vanity, but from a desire to show how the work of my later life has been the natural consequence of the impressions I received in my earliest childhood; and that, so to say, the pickaxe and spade for the excavation of Troy and the royal tombs of Mycenae were both forged and sharpened in the little German village in which I passed eight years of my earliest childhood. I also find it necessary to relate how I obtained the means which enabled me, in the autumn of my life, to realize the great projects I formed when I was a poor little boy. But I flatter myself that the manner in which I have employed my time, as well as the use I have made of my wealth, will meet with general approbation, and that my autobiography may aid in diffusing among the intelligent public of all countries a taste for those high and noble studies, which have sustained my courage during the hard trials of my life, and which will sweeten the days yet left me to live.