!O4 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



which the master's vision pierced so clearly. And 

 thus the doctrine of evolution has come to be insep- 

 arably interfused with the whole mass of thinking in 

 our day and generation. I do not mean to imply that 

 people commonly entertain very clear ideas about it, 

 for clear ideas on any subject are not altogether com- 

 mon. I suspect that a good many people would hesi- 

 tate if asked to state exactly what Newton's law of 

 gravitation is ; a good many, doubtless, would stop be- 

 fore arriving at that statement about inverse squares 

 which comprises the pith of the whole matter. 



Among the very few men in America forty years 

 ago who were feeling their way toward some such uni- 

 fied conception of Nature as Spencer was about to set 

 forth in all its glory among the very few who were 

 thus prepared to grasp the doctrine of evolution at 

 once and expound it with fresh illustrations Edward 

 Youmans was the first in the field. It was in the 

 course of the year 1856, while he was at work upon 

 the Household Science, that he fell in with an article 

 upon Spencer's Principles of Psychology in the Lon- 

 don Medico-Chirurgical Review, written by Dr. J. D. 

 Morell, author of some books on philosophy more read 

 then than now. Youmans was so deeply impressed by 

 the article that he at once sent to London for a copy 

 of the book, which had been published in the preced- 

 ing year. It will be observed that this was four years 

 before the Darwinian theory was announced in the first 

 edition of the Origin of Species. Toward the end of 

 that book Mr. Darwin looked forward to a " distant 

 future " when the conception of gradual development 

 might be applied to the phenomena of conscious intel- 

 ligence. He had not then learned of the existence of 

 such a book as the Principles of Psychology. In later 



