548 Edzvard Livingston Youmans. 



chemistry. The bent of his mind, moreover, early attracted him to origi- 

 nal investigation, and it is known that, before the age of seventeen, he 

 had discovered and worked out the electrotype process independently. 

 He had also solved certain difficult original problems relating to his chosen 

 profession, and devised a new and ingenious theorem in descriptive 

 geometry', which were afterward published in The Civil Engineer and 

 Architect's Journal. He completed his mathematical studies with his 

 uncle, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, a cultivated scholar, who graduated with | 

 honours at Cambridge. He was also a man of great liberality, advanced 

 in his political views, and the first clergyman of the Established Church 

 to take a public and prominent part in the movement for the repeal of the 

 Com Laws, having written and published extensively upon the subject. 

 At seventeen young Spencer commenced life as a civil engineer, being 

 first engaged under Mr. Charles Fox, afterward Sir Charles Fox, who had 

 been a pupil of his father, and afterward built the great Exhibition build- 

 ing of 1850. Some eight years were spent in this profession, when the 

 reaction from the railway mania of 1845 led to such a depression in the 

 engineering business that he abandoned it, and gave himself up to sys- 

 tematic study and a career of authorship. 



Note C. — Page ^ig. 



The following passage is from an able article republished in The 

 Popular Science Monthly, from the Westminster Review, on the De- 

 velopment of Psychology : 



" If Mr. Herbert Spencer had no other title to fame, he would still be j 

 the greatest of psychologists. The vast construction of his First Prin- 

 ciples Avill ever be a monument of his extraordinary powers of general- 

 ization. His designed organization of the Social Science opens up the 

 prospect of intellectual acquisitions in the future, to which the past may | 

 furnish few parallels. But the Principles of Psychology will still remain, \ 

 in its symmetrical completeness and perfect adequacy to the subject, at 

 once the most remarkable of his achievements and the most scientific 

 treatise on the Mind which has yet seen the light. Its publication in 1855 

 did not make a sensation. The persistent efforts of Mill had not yet suc- 

 ceeded in stemming the muddy tide of the prevailing scholasticism. The 

 bastard Kantism of Hamilton did duty for Metaphysics, and the Common- [ 

 Sense Philosophy of Reid, with the common sense left out, usurped the [ 

 place of experimental psychology. Experimental Psychology was as usual 

 busy with analysis, and had no eye for an imposing synthetical effort. Mr. 

 Spencer's work had, accordingly, a chill reception. Greeted by the aristo- 

 cratic metaphysicians with only a few words of courtly compliment, but 



