I\>f*nltjr I'.tiucation, and Other Mat: 251 



Mrs. Youmans wishes to be remembered, and - I the 



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



'farch /6, 1868. 



DEAR SI-IKR : 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 

 H. 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. VV. 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 work 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 <leri>ic>n 

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

 He t;ot them well started at first, when an old horse was given them t<> 

 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. 



