First Acquaintance with Herbert Spencer. 105 



editions he was obliged to modify his statement, and 

 confess that, instead of looking so far forward, he had 

 better have looked about him. I have more than once 

 heard Mr. Darwin laugh merrily over this, at his own 

 expense. 



When the book arrived from London it found You- 

 mans deeply engrossed in his own work. As he cut 

 the leaves and glanced over the pages, they seemed 

 immensely difficult. His sister had more leisure ; so 

 he gave the formidable volume to her, to see what she 

 could make of it. Finding in the preface a suggestion 

 that readers unfamiliar with such abstruse studies 

 might perhaps find it for their advantage to read the 

 third and fourth divisions of the work before attempt- 

 ing the first and second, she profited by the hint and 

 soon became deeply interested. 



After struggling for a while with the weighty 

 problems of this book — the most profound treatise 

 upon mental phenomena that any human mind has 

 3^et produced — Youmans saw that the theory ex- 

 pounded in it was a long stride in the direction of 

 a general theory of evolution. His interest in this 

 subject received a new and fresh stimulus. He read 

 Social Statics, and began to recognize Spencer's hand 

 in the anonymous articles in the quarterlies, in which 

 he was then announcing and illustrating various por- 

 tions or segments of his newly discovered law of evo- 

 lution. One evening in February, i860, as Youmans 

 was calling at Mr. Manning's house, in Brooklyn, the 

 Rev. Samuel Johnson, of Salem, showed him the 

 famous prospectus of the great series of philosophical 

 works which Spencer proposed to issue by subscrip- 

 tion. Mr. Johnson had obtained this from Edward 

 Silsbee, of Salem, who was one of the very first Ameri- 



