TJie Scientific Lcctjircr. 75 



The newness and freshness of a great truth add much 

 to the effect of its intrinsic importance. Fortunate are 

 the men who live in times when ideas of the first ma^-- 

 nitude mount above the horizon ; who are ycnnig 

 enough to be adequately impressed by them, sufli- 

 ciently mature to see their significance and think out 

 their implications. 



Such an idea of the first magnitude was the doc- 

 trine of evolution, the grandest thought of science. 

 By showing Nature to be a family it gave to classifica- 

 tion genetic relationship as its true basis. To educa- 

 tion it indicated a new^ way and the best. It made it 

 possible to write Nature's history backward to the 

 primitive chaos — as wonderful in all its dormant possi- 

 bilities as the cosmos it contained. It made the uni- 

 verse one in a new sense, for it bound together, in a 

 single web of causation worlds, continents, life, mind. 

 To have lived when this prodigious truth was ad- 

 vanced, debated, established, was a privilege rare in 

 the centuries. The inspiration of seeing the old 

 isolating mists dissolve and reveal the convergence of 

 all branches of knowledge is something that can hard- 

 ly be known to the men of a later generation, inherit- 

 ors of what this age has won. 



During the course of Youmans's career as a lec- 

 turer the atmosphere became charged with concep- 

 tions of evolution. Youmans had arrived at such con- 

 ceptions in the course of his study of the separate 

 lines of scientific speculation Avhich were now about 

 to be summed up and organized bv Herbert Spencer. 

 In the field of scientific generalization upon this great 

 scale Youmans was not an originator, but his broadly 

 sympathetic and luminous mind moved on a plane so 

 near to that of the originators that he seized at once 



