2 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



This swift advance in scientific discovery has be- 

 come a commonplace fact ; there are few cultivated 

 people who have not felt it and remarked upon it. 

 But among the American people, in the days before 

 the war, scientific education was far from following so 

 briskly in the wake of discovery as it does to-day. 

 Information was more slowly diffused, and new ideas 

 were received with more distrust. People's minds 

 were less flexible and less cosmopolitan. A country 

 clergyman in Connecticut once said to me, in 1857, 

 " There is a great intellectual movement going on in 

 Europe of which scarcely anything is known or even 

 suspected in this country." There was much truth in 

 this remark. What the worthy minister had chiefly 

 in mind (for he used to read German books) was the 

 ludicrous ignorance of biblical criticism displayed in 

 American theological magazines and journals ; but 

 what he said was true of many departments of study. 

 Lyell's great work on geology was published in 1830; 

 a quarter of a century later I do not believe there 

 were five men in our town who had ever heard of 

 " uniformitarianism " ; it was only a very bold spirit 

 that ventured to allude to the earth as more than six 

 thousand years old. Science in general was regarded 

 as a miscellaneous 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 provinces, few 

 minds, indeed, had grappled with such a staggering 

 conception. The sciences were studied in fragments, 

 and how crude were the methods is well shown by the 

 fact that Harvard students were set to learn physics 

 and chemistry by reading in books about magnets and 

 alkalis. 



