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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



EDITOR'S TABLE. 



THE FOUNDER OF THE POPULAR 

 SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE readers of this magazine will, 

 we are sure, appreciate the satis- 

 faction with which we have lately 

 hailed the appearance of a biography, 

 done by a most competent hand, of the 

 late Prof. E. L. Youmans. This bi- 

 ography is one which all who were 

 measurably acquainted with the late 

 professor's work in the cause of science 

 felt must be given to the world. Many 

 biographies are not much more than 

 tributes to the interest which a man's 

 personal friends take in his character 

 and career; but in the case of the late 

 Prof. Youmans a chapter in the history 

 of the intellectual development of this 

 country would have been missing had 

 his biography not been written. He 

 came at a critical time ; he was the 

 man for the crisis ; he saw his work, 

 and he did it. That work was prepar- 

 ing the public mind on this side of the 

 Atlantic for the reception of a new 

 order of ideas in science and philoso- 

 phy, and then transplanting those ideas 

 into the soil so prepared. Prof. Fiske, 

 whose literary skill never appeared to 

 greater advantage than in the produc- 

 tion of this biography, quotes a country 

 clergyman as having said to him in 

 1857, " There is a great intellectual 

 movement going on in Europe of which 

 scarcely anything is known or even 

 suspected in this country." The pro- 

 fessor himself adds : " Lyell's great 

 work on geology was published in 1830; 

 a quarter of a century later I do not be- 

 lieve there were five men in our town 

 who had ever heard of ' uniformitarian- 

 ism ' ; it was only a very bold spirit 

 that ventured to allude to the earth as 

 more than six thousand years old. Sci- 

 ence in general was regarded as a mis- 

 cellaneous collection of facts and rules, 



some useful, some curious or even 

 pretty ; as for looking upon it as a vast 

 coherent body of truths concerning the 

 universe and its interdependent prov- 

 inces, few minds, indeed, had grappled 

 with such a conception." As late as 

 the year 1860 one of the most enter- 

 prising and liberal publishing houses in 

 Boston declined to republish Spencer's 

 essays on education. " The Americans 

 at that time," says Prof. Fiske again, 

 " were excessively provincial. There 

 was much intellectual eagerness, along 

 with very meager knowledge." 



Edward L. Youmans was born in 

 the year 1821. We need not recite any 

 of the incidents of his life, which are 

 given in the most interesting manner 

 by Prof. Fiske, and were also sketched 

 last month in another department of 

 this magazine. What we wish to point 

 out is that, born in what his biographer 

 calls a " provincial " society, he had an 

 intellectual eagerness which was not 

 satisfied with meager knowledge, nor 

 yet with meager scientific conceptions. 

 There was in him a singular and happy 

 union of practicality and philosophic 

 breadth. He was utilitarian in his 

 aims, but he loved a wide expanse for 

 his thoughts. Domestic economy was 

 with him a favorite field of investiga- 

 tion and study, but at another moment 

 he would take the keenest delight in 

 seeing the plowshare of a vigorous 

 criticism ripping up the clods of old 

 philosophical systems. He did not him- 

 self claim to be an original investigator 

 nor does his biographer make the 

 claim for him in any important sense ; 

 but he was ever on the watch for some 

 enlargement of human knowledge or 

 some improvement in the instruments 

 of intellectual research. His was a 

 pre-eminently open mind, and he loved 

 science because, though it might have 



