266 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



essays immediately gave me the lead winch I wanted to bring 

 into shape the crude notions which had been floating in my head 

 for five or six years, especially since the Oxford days. The con- 

 ception of society, of social forces, and of the science of society 

 there offered, was just the one which I had been groping after, 

 but had not been able to reduce for myself. It solved the old 

 difficulty about the relation of social science to history, rescued 

 social science from the dominion of the cranks, and offered a defi- 

 nite and magnificent field for work, from which we might hope 

 at last to derive definite results for the solution of social prob- 

 lems. 



" It was at this juncture (1872) that I was offered the chair of 

 Political and Social Science at Yale. I had always been very 

 fond of teaching, and knew that the best work I could ever do in 

 the world would be in that profession ; also, that I ought to be in 

 an academical career. I had seen two or three cases of men who, 

 in that career, would have achieved distinguished usefulness, but 

 who were wasted in the parish and the pulpit." 



Mr. Sumner returned to New Haven as professor in Septem- 

 ber, 1872. Of the further development of his opinions he says : 



"I was definitely converted to evolution by Prof. Marsh's 

 horses some time about 1875 or 1876. I had re-read Spencer's ' So- 

 cial Statics ' and his ' First Principles,' the second part of the latter 

 now absorbing all my attention. I now read all of Darwin, Hux- 

 ley, Haeckel, and quite a series of the natural scientists. I greatly 

 regretted that I had no education in natural science, especially in 

 biology; but I found that the 'philosophy of history' and the 

 ' principles of philology,' as I had learned them, speedily adjusted 

 themselves to the new conception, and won a new meaning and 

 power from it. As Spencer's ' Principles of Sociology ' was now 

 coming out in numbers, I was constantly getting evidence that 

 sociology, if it borrowed the theory of evolution in the first place, 

 would speedily render it back again enriched by new and inde- 

 pendent evidence. I formed a class to read Spencer's book in the 

 parts as they came out, and believe that I began to interest men 

 in this important department of study, and to prepare them to 

 follow its development, years before any such attempt was made 

 at any other university in the world. I have followed the growth 

 of the science of sociology in all its branches, and have seen it far 

 surpass all the hope and faith I ever had in it. I have spent an 

 immense amount of work on it, which has been lost because mis- 

 directed. The only merit I can claim in that respect is that I 

 have corrected my own mistakes. I have not published them for 

 others to correct." . 



The above statement of the history of Prof. Sumner's educa- 

 tion shows the school of opinion to which he belongs. He adopts 



