436 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



opposed.* Young Spencer was kept at lioine till he was just 

 fourteen, thus reaping the advantage of his father's personal 

 training and attention, and breathing an intellectual atmosphere 

 unusually clear and stimulating. He was then placed in charge 

 of his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, at that time perpetual 

 curate of the parish of Hinton Charterhouse, near Bath. With 

 this relative, who, it should be said, though an Episcopal clergy- 

 man, was a vigorous thinker and an energetic social reformer, he 

 spent three years, making little of Greek Testament and Latin 

 grammar, but manifesting extraordinary originality in the math- 

 ematical and mechanical studies to which a portion of his atten- 

 tion was devoted. 



The design at this period entertained by Thomas Spencer, him- 

 self an academic honors man and to a certain extent an advocate 

 of classical culture, of sending Herbert to Cambridge, was gradu- 

 ally relinquished as impracticable, and Spencer thus adds another 

 to the long list of English leaders of thought who owe nothing 

 directly to one or other of the great institutions of learning. On 

 leaving Hinton the lad returned to his father's house, where he 

 spent what was, to outward seeming, an idle and profitless year. 

 Then, after a brief experiment in teaching, he made his real start 

 in life in a profession to which the bias of his interests and the line 

 of his studies alike pointed that of the civil engineer. This was 

 in the autumn of 1837. It was then the early days of the railroad 

 excitement, and for a time the career he had chosen continued to 

 offer a promising field. But presently the tide of activity ebbed 

 gradually away, and after eight or ten years of intermittent work 

 Spencer finally abandoned a calling in which he now saw little 

 chance of substantial success, and thus at twenty- six found him- 

 self but slightly advanced toward a definite settlement in life. 



Meanwhile, the expansion of his thought had already begun. 

 At the age of twenty, while engaged on the Birmingham and 

 Gloucester Railway, he had read Lyell's Principles of Geology, 

 and had espoused what was then known as the Development 

 Hypothesis; accepting the Lamarckian view (combated by 

 Lyell) so far as to believe in the evolution of species, but reject- 

 ing all the great Frenchman's theories save that of the adapta- 

 tion of the organism to its environment by the inheritance of 

 acquired characters. His first piece of philosophical reasoning 

 had also seen the light. In 1842 he had contributed to a paper 

 called The Nonconformist a series of letters, subsequently revised 

 and reissued in pamphlet form, on The Proper Sphere of Govern- 



* In this and a few other matters I am able, through the kindness of Mr. Spencer him- 

 self, to correct not only some current misapprehensions, but also several errors of detail in 

 the biographical chapter in my Introduction to the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer. 



