6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



streets, at other times the blindness was almost total, and this 

 state of things lasted for nearly thirteen years. 



This dreadful calamity seemed to make it impossible to con- 

 tinue any systematic course of study, and the outlook for satis- 

 factory work of any sort was extremely discouraging. The first 

 necessity was medical assistance, and in quest of this Mr. You- 

 mans came in the autumn of 1839 to New York, where for the 

 most part he spent the remainder of his life. Until 1851 he was 

 under the care of an oculist. Under such circumstances, if a man 

 of eager energy and boundless intellectual craving were to be 

 overwhelmed with despondency, we could not call it strange. If 

 he were to become dependent upon friends for the means of sup- 

 port, it would be ungracious if not unjust to blame him. But 

 Edward Youmans was not made of the stuff that acquiesces in 

 defeat. He rose superior to calamity, he won the means of liveli- 

 hood, and in darkness entered upon the path to an enviable fame. 

 At first he had to resign himself to spending weary weeks over 

 tasks that with sound eye-sight could have been dispatched in as 

 many days. He invented some kind of writing-machine which held 

 his paper firmly and enabled his pen to follow straight lines at 

 proper distances apart. Long practice of this sort gave his hand- 

 writing a peculiar character which it retained in later years. 

 When I first saw it in 1863 it seemed almost undecipherable ; but 

 that was far from being the case, and, after I had grown used to 

 it, I found it but little less legible than the most beautiful chi- 

 rography. The strokes, gnarled and jagged as they were, had a 

 method in their madness, and every pithy sentence went straight 

 as an arrow to its mark. 



While conquering these physical obstacles Mr. Youmans began 

 writing for the press, and gradually entered into relations with 

 leading newspapers which became more and more important and 

 useful as years went on. He became acquainted with Horace 

 Greeley, William Henry Channing, and other gentlemen who 

 were interested in social reforms. His sympathies were strongly 

 enlisted with the little party of abolitionists, then held in such 

 scornful disfavor by all other parties. He was also interested in 

 the party of temperance, which, as he and others were afterward 

 to learn, compounded for its essential uprightness of purpose by 

 indulging in very gross intemperance of speech and action. The 

 disinterestedness which always characterized him was illustrated 

 by his writing many articles for a temperance paper which could 

 not afford to pay its contributors, although he was struggling 

 with such disadvantages in earning his own livelihood and carry- 

 ing on his scientific studies. Those were days when leading re- 

 formers believed that by some cunningly contrived alteration of 

 social arrangements our human nature, with all its inheritance 



