62 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



plained to her brother what she had been doing-. 

 These studies were intended to be preliminary to the 

 analysis of soils, but by the time she was able to make 

 such analysis Mr. Youmans had become convinced 

 that they were of no value in practical agriculture. 

 In the course of his pondering over chemical facts 

 which he was obliged to take at second hand, it oc- 

 curred to him that most of the pupils in common 

 schools who studied chemistry were practically no 

 better off. It was easy enough for schools to buy 

 text-books, but difficult for them to provide labora- 

 tories and apparatus ; and it was much easier withal 

 to find teachers who could ask questions out of a book 

 than those who could use apparatus if provided. It 

 was customary, therefore, to learn chemistry by rote ; 

 or, in other words, pupils' heads were crammed with 

 unintelligible statements about things with queer 

 names such as manganese or tellurium which they 

 had never seen, and would not know if they were to 

 see them. It occurred to Youmans that, if visible 

 processes could not be brought before pupils, at any 

 rate the fundamental conceptions of chemistry might 

 be made clear by means of diagrams. He began de- 

 vising diagrams in different colours, to illustrate the 

 diversity in the atomic weights of the principal ele- 

 ments, and the composition of the more familiar com- 

 pounds. At length, by uniting his diagrams, he ob- 

 tained a comprehensive coloured chart exhibiting the 

 outlines of the whole scheme of chemical combination 

 according to the binary or dualist theory then in 

 vogue. 



These diagrams elicited much interest among his 

 friends. One of them (Mr. J. R. Burdsall) was a drug- 

 gist and dealer in patent medicines, whose advertise- 



