As a child, Donne's precocity was such that it was said of him that "this age hath brought forth another Pico della Mirandola."
Avicenna was put in charge of a tutor, and his precocity soon made him the marvel of his neighbours, - as a boy of ten who knew by rote the Koran and much Arabic poetry besides.
Even in an imitative artist such precocity of talent is remarkable, and the date is therefore open to legitimate doubt.
From the earliest age young Niebuhr manifested extraordinary precocity, and from 1794 to 1796, being already a finished classical scholar and acquainted with several modern languages, he studied at the university of Kiel.
He was educated at the college of the Jesuits in his native city, and distinguished himself by the extraordinary precocity and versatility of his talents.
His precocity was extraordinary; at three years of age he was able to read, and in his thirteenth year he composed Greek and Latin orations and delivered them in public. When he was about eighteen he went to the university of Copenhagen and afterwards studied at Rostock and Wittenberg.
His precocity was remarkable.
It is said that in his earliest boyhood Andrea was, like Giotto, put to shepherding or cattle-herding; this is not likely, and can at any rate have lasted only a very short while, as his natural genius for art developed with singular precocity, and excited the attention of Francesco Squarcione, who entered him in the gild of painters before he had completed his eleventh year.
Nevertheless he has a distinguished place in the story of precocious children, and in the much more limited chapter of children whose precocity has been followed by great performance at maturity, though he never became what is called a learned man, perhaps did not know Greek, and was pretty certainly indebted for most of his miscellaneous reading to Montaigne.
Other small-fruited pears, distinguished by their precocity and apple-like fruit, may be referred to P. cordate, a species found wild in western France, and in Devonshire and Cornwall.
The grain was very fine and well grown, which gave me the idea to keep it for a trial, and see if the following year it would preserve its precocity.
The score was accidentally destroyed by fire, but a set of studies a la Czerny and Cramer, belonging to 1826 and published at Marseilles as 12 Etudes, op. i., is extant, and shows remarkable precocity.
There are wonderful stories on record of his precocity in mathematical learning, which is sufficiently established by the well-attested fact that he had completed before he was sixteen years of age a work on the conic sections, in which he had laid down a series of propositions, discovered by himself, of such importance that they may be said to form the foundations of the modern treatment of that subject.
To say that they evince precocity of intellect gives no idea of their main characteristics.