I entered the shop of a bookseller and bookbinder at the age of thirteen, in the year 1804, remained there eight years, and during the chief part of my time bound books.

Now it was in those books, in the hours after work, that I found the beginning of my philosophy.
There were two that especially helped me, the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," from which I gained my first notions of electricity, and Mrs.Marcet's "Conversation on Chemistry," which gave me my foundation in that science.
'Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person.

I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the "Arabian Nights" as easily as in the "Encyclopaedia." But facts were important to me, and saved me.

I could trust a fact, and always cross-examined an assertion.

So when I questioned Mrs.Marcet's book by such little experiments as I could find means to perform, and found it true to the facts as I could understand them, I felt that I had got hold of an anchor in chemical knowledge, and clung fast to it.