It might be thought that, immersed in business and preoccupied with
schemes of this character, Mr. Edison was to blame for the neglect of
his son's education. But that was not the case. The conditions were
peculiar. It was at the Port Huron public school that Edison received
all the regular scholastic instruction he ever enjoyed--just three
months. He might have spent the full term there, but, as already noted,
his teacher had found him "addled." He was always, according to his own
recollection, at the foot of the class, and had come almost to regard
himself as a dunce, while his father entertained vague anxieties as to
his stupidity. The truth of the matter seems to be that Mrs. Edison, a
teacher of uncommon ability and force, held no very high opinion of
the average public-school methods and results, and was both eager to
undertake the instruction of her son and ambitious for the future of
a boy whom she knew from pedagogic experience to be receptive and
thoughtful to a very unusual degree. With her he found study easy and
pleasant. The quality of culture in that simple but refined home, as
well as the intellectual character of this youth without schooling, may
be inferred from the fact that before he had reached the age of twelve
he had read, with his mother's help, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Hume's History of England, Sears' History of the World,
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the Dictionary of Sciences; and had
even attempted to struggle through Newton's Principia, whose mathematics
were decidedly beyond both teacher and student. Besides, Edison, like
Faraday, was never a mathematician, and has had little personal use
for arithmetic beyond that which is called "mental." He said once to a
friend: "I can always hire some mathematicians, but they can't hire me."
His father, by-the-way, always encouraged these literary tastes, and
paid him a small sum for each new book mastered. It will be noted that
fiction makes no showing in the list; but it was not altogether