26 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



years. He came to realize how crude and primitive 

 are our methods of making the earth yield its produce, 

 and it was his opinion I believe most profound and 

 farsighted that, when men have once learned how 

 to conduct agriculture upon sound scientific prin- 

 ciples, farming will become one of the most whole- 

 some and attractive forms of human industry. 



It was chiefly during the summer intervals, when 

 he did not attend school, that Edward helped his 

 father on the farm. His younger brother Warren, an 

 untiring worker, used sometimes to find him in a shady 

 corner with a book in his hand instead of a hoe, and 

 was known to utter candid criticisms upon such kind 

 of farming. The offending book was apt to relate to 

 subjects widely remote from agriculture. Edward 

 read quite as much for pleasure as for profit. One of 

 the Wheeler boys lent him, when nine years old, a 

 copy of the Iliad containing an English translation, and 

 this interested him so deeply that after a while his 

 father bought it for him, along with the Odyssey, the 

 ^Eneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The minister, the 

 doctor, and the whole neighbourhood were brought 

 under contribution to satisfy this thirst for knowledge. 

 Edward was from his earliest childhood a borrower of 

 books. In later years, after I had come to know him, 

 I thought I had never seen a man so generous .with 

 books ; it was his delight not so much to lend as to 

 give them outright wherever he saw that they could 

 do good. His mother used to allude to his supreme 

 disgust, at the age of ten, when an old woman in the 

 neighbourhood refused him the loan of Pilgrim's Prog- 

 ress on the ground that he could not understand it. 

 To his persistent researches things often turned up in 

 queer places. His sister, Miss Eliza Youmans, says the 



