Birth and Childhood. 5 



while I very much doubt the soundness of the gener- 

 alizations we are so prone to make about race charac- 

 teristics, I can not but feel that for the impulsive one 

 had almost said explosive warmth of sympathy, the 

 enchanting grace and vivacity of manner, in Edward 

 Youmans, this strain of Irish blood may have been to 

 some extent accountable. Both father and mother 

 belonged to the old Puritan stock of New England, 

 and, excepting a Dutch great-grandmother, the father's 

 ancestry was purely English.* Nothing could be more 

 honourably or characteristically English than the name. 

 In the old feudal society the yeoman, like the frank- 

 lin, was the small freeholder, owning a modest estate 

 yet holding it by no servile tenure, a man of the com- 

 mon people yet no churl, a member of the state who 

 " knew his rights, and knowing dared maintain." Few, 

 indeed, were the nooks and corners outside of merry 

 England where such men flourished as the yeomen 

 and franklins who founded democratic New England. 

 It has often been remarked how the most illustrious 

 of Franklins exemplified the typical virtues of his class. 

 There was much that was similar in the temperament 

 and disposition of Edward Youmans the sagacity and 

 penetration, the broad common sense, the earnest pur- 

 pose veiled but not hidden by the blithe humour, the 

 devotion to ends of wide practical value, the habit of 

 making in the best sense the most out of life. 



Into the mother's skein of heredity there had en- 

 tered a silken thread of romance. Her grandmother, 

 Catherine Moore, when a child of three or four years, 

 had landed at New Haven, after a stormy voyage 

 across the Atlantic. Family tradition has it that the 



* See Appendix A. 



