270 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



special title, The Age of Imagination, 

 will appear in our July number. It 

 deals with what the author calls "the 

 piny of imagination, the tnagic trans- 

 muting of things through the sheer 

 liveliness and wanton activity of a child's 

 fancy." The mind of the child is still 

 a little-explored country, and an exami- 

 nation of it under Prof. Sully's compe- 

 tent guidance will not only have the 

 charm of novelty but will also furnish 

 much helpful insight to all who have 

 the care of children. 



UTEI^ARY NOTICES. 



Edward Livingston Youmans, Interpreter 

 OF Science for the People : A Sketch 

 OF HIS Life, with Selections from his 

 Published Writings and Extracts 

 from his Correspondence with Spencer, 

 Huxley, Tyndall, and Others. By 

 John Fiske. New York : D. Appleton 

 & Co., 1894. Pp. 600. Price, $2. 



Few men of this generation in America 

 have better deserved an enduring monument 

 to their memory than the late Prof. Edward 

 L. Youmans. Such a monument, we may 

 trust, is supplied by the ably written biogra- 

 phy by Prof. Fiske. The author was inti- 

 mately acquainted with him for many years, 

 and has produced a most interesting and 

 pleasing sketch of his character and career, 

 one marked, as might have been expected, 

 by ardent and enthusiastic sympathy with 

 his subject, yet equally characterized by 

 moderation and good taste. Let us first 

 glean a few of the biographical details fur- 

 nished by Mr. Fiske. 



Edward Livingston Youmans was bom 

 in the town of Coeymans, Albany County, 

 N. Y., on the 3d of June, 1821. His father, 

 Vincent Youmans, is described as " a man 

 of independent character, strong convictions, 

 and perfect moral courage," and his mother, 

 Catherine Scofield, as " notable for balance 

 of judgment, prudence, and tact." Both 

 father and mother belonged to the old Puri- 

 tan stock of New England, and in Edward 

 Youmans the best and richest qualities of 

 that stock came to the surface " sagacity 

 and penetration, broad common sense, ear- 

 nest purpose, veiled but not hidden by a blithe 



humor, devotion to ends of practical value, 

 and the habit of making in the best sense 

 the most out of life." 



A few months after Edward Youmans 

 was born, his father, who pursued the occu 

 pation of wagon-maker, removed from Coey- 

 mans to Greenfield, in Saratoga County. 

 Here and in the neighboring town of Milton, 

 to which he removed ten years later, five 

 other sons and one daughter were born, and 

 Edward, as the eldest child, took an active 

 and very willing part in looking after the 

 younger ones. Until his sixteenth year he 

 helped his father at work in summer and 

 attended the district school in winter. The 

 most wholesome feature of such schools was 

 an absence of overregulation. It was one 

 that Edward learned early to appreciate, 

 and he always cherished a distrust of ex- 

 cessive organization and a dislike to machine 

 methods. 



At the age of thirteen the youth became 

 possessed of a copy of Comstock's Natural 

 Philosophy, and shortly set to work to repeat 

 some of the experiments therein described. 

 He next obtained a copy of Comstock's Man- 

 ual of Chemistry, which he studied as best 

 he could by himself, for his school-teacher 

 had no knowledge whatever of the subject. 

 From it he gathered the opinion, as Prof. 

 Fiske tells us, that, " when men have once 

 learned how to conduct agriculture upon 

 sound scientific principles, farming will be- 

 come one of the most wholesome and attract- 

 ive forms of human industry." " 



Such was the youth of Edward Youmans, 

 such the stock from which he sprang, such 

 his original habitat and environment. Our 

 narrative up to this point presents no re- 

 markable features, and yet this home-bred 

 youth was destined to do a great work to 

 be, if we may use the expression, the foster- 

 father of a great system of philosophy on the 

 North American continent, the virtual leader 

 of the intellectual forces that rallied under 

 the banner of evolution. As a man he had 

 these two great qualifications for practical 

 success : he knew a good thing when he saw 

 it, and what his hand found to do he did 

 with his might. But before he entered upon 

 his work as a teacher and champion of evo- 

 lution and general popularizer of science, he 

 was destined to pass through a very painful 

 period of his life a period during which he 



