EDWARD LIVINGSTON YOUMANS. 9 



ence were set forth, in such a way as to charm the student and 

 make him wish for more. The book had an immediate and 

 signal success ; in after-years it was twice rewritten by the au- 

 thor, to accommodate it to the rapid advances made by the sci- 

 ence, and it is still one of our best text-books of chemistry. It 

 has had a sale of about one hundred and fifty thousand copies. 



The publication of this book at once established its author's 

 reputation as a scientific writer, and in another way it marked an 

 era in his life. The long, distressing period of darkness now came 

 to an end. Sight was so far recovered in one eye that it became 

 possible to go about freely, to read, to recognize friends, to travel, 

 and make much, of life. I am told that his face had acquired an 

 expression characteristic of the blind, but that expression was 

 afterward completely lost. When I knew. him it would never 

 have occurred to me that his sight was imperfect, except perhaps 

 as regards length of range. 



Mr. Youmans's career as a scientific lecturer now began. His 

 first lecture was the beginning of a series on the relations of 

 organic life to the atmosphere. It was illustrated with chemical 

 apparatus, and was given in a private room in New York to an 

 audience which filled the room. Probably no lecturer ever faced 

 his first audience without some trepidation, and Mr. Youmans 

 had not the main-stay and refuge afforded by a manuscript, for 

 his sight was never good enough to make such an aid available 

 for his lectures. At first the right words were slow in finding 

 their way to those ready lips, and his friends were beginning to 

 grow anxious, when all at once a happy accident broke the spell. 

 He was remarking upon the characteristic instability of nitrogen, 

 and pointing to a jar of that gas on the table before him, when 

 some fidgety movement of his knocked the jar off the table. He 

 improved the occasion with one of his quaint bons mots, and, as 

 there is nothing that greases the wheels of life like a laugh, the 

 lecture went on to a successful close. 



This was the beginning of a busy career of seventeen years of 

 lecturing, ending in 18G8 ; and I believe it is safe to say that few 

 things were done in all those years of more vital and lasting 

 benefit to the American people than this broadcast sowing of the 

 seeds of scientific thought in the lectures of Edward Youmans. 

 They came just at the time when the world was ripe for the doc- 

 trine of evolution, when all the wondrous significance of the 

 trend of scientific discovery since Newton's time was beginning 

 to burst upon men's minds. The work of Lyell in geology, fol- 

 lowed at length, in 1859 by the Darwinian theory ; the doctrine of 

 the correlation of forces and the consequent unity of nature ; the 

 extension and reformation of chemical theory ; the simultaneous 

 advance made in sociological inquiry, and in the conception of the 



