Popular Education, and Other Matters. 251 



Mrs. Youmans wishes to be remembered, and expresses the 

 hope that you are attending first of all to your health. 



New York, March 16, 1S68. 

 Dear Sister : A short note from Spencer this morning 

 states that he is down,* and packing for Italy to start at 

 once and be absent two months or more. A man named 

 B. Waterhouse Hawkins, of London, naturalist or mythol- 

 ogist, acclimatizologist, and palaeontologist (reconstructor 

 of the monsters of a former world in the Crystal Palace 

 grounds), called on me day before yesterday with a card 

 from Huxley. He wants to lecture and to reconstruct the 

 American monsters in the Central Park. He has many let- 

 ters to many people from Lord Stanley and the inevitable 

 Sir Roderick, but Huxley sent him to me, and told him to 

 put himself in my hands, and so I have him on my hands. 

 I gazetted him in all the morning papers, and arranged for 

 him to speak before the Lyceum of Natural History to- 

 night. I had never heard of B. W. H., but he appears to 

 be well known to all the scientific men. Huxley is out 

 with a new and very strong thing, in the March Macmil- 

 lan, entitled A Liberal Education and Where to get it.f 



New York, Wednesday, March 28, 1868. 

 Dear Sister : I am up to my eyes in this Hawkins 

 business, the whole ivork of bringing him out devolving 



* I. e., in poor health. 



f The place to get a liberal education was certainly not the American 

 college, of which Prof. E. D. Cope once told Youmans, " a college where 

 the whole classical power was concentrated in the effort to throw derision 

 upon his [Cope's] subjects and to shame the boys out of caring for them. 

 He got them well started at first, when -an old horse was given them to 

 prepare the skeleton. They commenced boiling him up to clean the 

 bones, when the classical power actually incited a mob to break up the 

 proceedings, and it proved a deathblow to biological studies !" And yet 

 Fourth-of-July orators persist in calling this a free and enlightened coun- 

 try, and allude to the Dark Ages as to a period remote and elapsed. 



