mind ready of itself to take the initiative. It is doubtful if men of
eminent ability are ever made so by schooling. The school offers
opportunities, but in such men the tendency to the initiative is so
strong that if opportunities are not offered they will somehow contrive
to create them. When Edward Youmans was about thirteen years old he
persuaded his father to buy him a copy of Comstock's Natural Philosophy.
This book he studied at home by himself, and repeated many of the
experiments with apparatus of his own contriving. When he made a
centrifugal water wheel, and explained to the men and boys of the
neighbourhood the principle of its revolution in a direction opposite to
that of the stream which moved it, we may regard it as his earliest
attempt at giving scientific lectures. It was natural that one who had
become interested in physics should wish to study chemistry. The teacher
(who was not "Uncle Good") had never so much as laid eyes on a textbook
of chemistry; but Edward was not to be daunted by such trifles. A copy
of Comstock's manual was procured, another pupil was found willing to
join in the study, and this class of two proceeded to learn what they
could from reading the book, while the teacher asked them the printed
questions,--those questions the mere existence of which in textbooks is
apt to show what a low view publishers take of the average intelligence
of teachers! It was not a very hopeful way of studying such a subject as
chemistry; but doubtless the time was not wasted, and the foundations
for a future knowledge of chemistry were laid. The experience of farm
work which accompanied these studies explains the interest which in
later years Mr. Youmans felt in agricultural chemistry. He came to
realize how crude and primitive are our methods of making the earth
yield its produce, and it was his opinion that when men have once
learned how to conduct agriculture upon sound scientific principles,
farming will become at once the most wholesome and the most attractive
form of human industry.
Along with the elementary studies in science there went a great deal of
miscellaneous reading, mostly, it would appear, of good solid books.
Apparently there was at that time no study of languages, ancient or
modern. At the age of seventeen the young man had shown so much promise
that it was decided he should study law, and he had already entered upon
a more extensive course of preparation in an academy in Saratoga County
when the event occurred which changed the whole course of his life. He
had been naturally gifted with keen and accurate vision, was a good
sports-man and an excellent shot with a rifle; but at about the age of
thirteen there had come an attack of ophthalmia, which left the eyes
weak and sensitive. Perpetual reading probably increased the difficulty
and hindered complete recovery. At the age of seventeen violent
inflammation set in; the sight in one eye was completely lost, while in
the other it grew so dim as to be of little avail. Sometimes he would be
just able to find his way about the streets, at other times the
blindness was almost total; and this state of things lasted for nearly
thirteen years.
This dreadful calamity seemed to make it impossible to continue any
systematic course of study, and the outlook for satisfactory work of any
sort was extremely discouraging. The first necessity was medical
assistance, and in quest of this Mr. Youmans came in the autumn of 1839
to New York, where for the most part he spent the remainder of his life.
Until 1851 he was under the care of an oculist. Under such
circumstances, if a man of eager energy and boundless intellectual
craving were to be overwhelmed with despondency, we could not call it
strange. If he were to become dependent upon friends for the means of
support, it would be ungracious, if not unjust, to blame him. But Edward
Youmans was not made of the stuff that acquiesces in defeat. He rose
superior to calamity; he won the means of livelihood, and in darkness
entered upon the path to an enviable fame. At first he had to resign
himself to spending weary weeks over tasks that with sound eyesight
could have been dispatched in as many days. He invented some kind of
writing machine, which held his paper firmly, and enabled his pen to
follow straight lines at proper distances apart. Long practice of this
sort gave his handwriting a peculiar character which it retained in
later years. When I first saw it in 1863 it seemed almost
undecipherable; but that was far from being the case, and after I had
grown used to it I found it but little less legible than the most
beautiful chirography. The strokes, gnarled and jagged as they were, had
a method in their madness, and every pithy sentence went straight as an
arrow to its mark.
While conquering these physical obstacles Mr. Youmans began writing for
the press, and gradually entered into relations with leading newspapers
which became more and more important and useful as years went on. He
became acquainted with Horace Greeley, William Henry Charming, and other
gentlemen who were interested in social reforms. His sympathies were
strongly enlisted with the little party of abolitionists, then held in
such scornful disfavour by all other parties. He was also interested in
the party of temperance, which, as he and others were afterward to
learn, compounded for its essential uprightness of purpose by indulging
in very gross intemperance of speech and action. The disinterestedness
which always characterized him was illustrated by his writing many
articles for a temperance paper which could not afford to pay its
contributors, although he was struggling with such disadvantages in
earning his own livelihood and carrying on his scientific studies. Those
were days when leading reformers believed that by some cunningly
contrived alteration of social arrangements our human nature, with all
its inheritance from countless ages of brutality, can somehow be made
over all in a moment, just as one would go to work with masons and
carpenters and revamp a house. There are many good people who still
labour under such a delusion.
Though Mr. Youmans was brought into frequent contact with reformers of
this sort, it does not seem to me that his mind was ever deeply
impressed with such ways of thinking. Science is teaching us that the
method of evolution is that mill of God, of which we have heard, which,
while it grinds with infinite efficacy, yet grinds with wearisome
slowness. It was Mr. Darwin's discovery of natural selection which first
brought this truth home to us; but Sir Charles Lyell had in 1830 shown
how enormous effects are wrought by the cumulative action of slight and
unobtrusive causes, and this had much to do with turning men's minds
toward some conception of evolution. It was about 1847 that Mr. Youmans
was deeply interested in the work of geologists, as well as in the
Nebular Theory, to which recent discoveries were adding fresh
confirmation. Some time before this he had read that famous book
"Vestiges of Creation," and although Professor Agassiz truly declared
that it was an unscientific book, crammed with antiquated and exploded
fancies, I suspect that Mr. Youmans felt that amid all the chaff there
was a very sound and sturdy kernel of truth.
Among the books which Mr. Youmans projected at this time, the first was
a compendious history of progress in discovery and invention; but, after
he had made extensive preparations, a book was published so similar in
scope and treatment that he abandoned the undertaking. Another work was
a treatise on arithmetic, on a new and philosophical plan; but, when
this was approaching completion, he again found himself anticipated,
this time by the book of Horace Mann. This was discouraging enough, but
a third venture resulted in a brilliant success. We have observed the
eagerness with which, as a schoolboy, Mr. Youmans entered upon the study
of chemistry. His interest in this science grew with years, and he
devoted himself to it so far as was practicable. For a blind man to
carry on the study of a science which is preëminently one of observation
and experiment might seem hopeless. It was at any rate absolutely
necessary to see with the eyes of others, if not with his own. Here the
assistance rendered by his sister was invaluable. During most of this
period she served as amanuensis and reader for him. But, more than this,
she kept up for some time a course of laboratory work, the results of
which were minutely described to her brother and discussed with him in
the evenings. The lectures of Dr. John William Draper on chemistry were
also thoroughly discussed and pondered.
The conditions under which Mr. Youmans worked made it necessary for him
to consider every point with the extreme deliberation involved in
framing distinct mental images of things and processes which he could
not watch with the eye. It was hard discipline, but he doubtless
profited from it. Nature had endowed him with an unusually clear head,
but this enforced method must have made it still clearer. One of the
most notable qualities of his mind was the absolute luminousness with
which he saw things and the relations among things. It was this quality
that made him so successful as an expounder of scientific truths. In the
course of his pondering over chemical facts which he was obliged to take
at second hand, it occurred 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 textbooks, but difficult for them to
provide laboratories 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 Mr. 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 devising diagrams in different colours, to illustrate
the diversity in the atomic weights of the principal elements, and the
composition of the more familiar compounds. At length, by uniting his
diagrams, he obtained a comprehensive chart exhibiting the outlines of
the whole scheme of chemical combination according to the binary or
dualist theory then in vogue. This chart, when published, was a great
success. It not only facilitated the acquirement of clear ideas, but it
was suggestive of new ideas. It proved very popular, and kept the field
until the binary theory was overthrown by the modern doctrine of
substitution, which does not lend itself so readily to graphic
treatment.
The success of the chemical chart led to the writing of a textbook of
chemistry. This laborious work was completed in 1851, when Mr. Youmans
was thirty years old. Professor Silliman was then regarded as one of our
foremost authorities in chemistry, but it was at once remarked of the
new book that it showed quite as thorough a mastery of the whole subject
of chemical combination as Silliman's. It was a textbook of a kind far
less common then than now. There was nothing dry about it. The subject
was presented with beautiful clearness, in a most attractive style.
There was a firm grasp of the philosophical principles underlying
chemical phenomena, and the meaning and functions of the science were
set forth in such a way as to charm the student and make him wish for
more. The book had an immediate and signal success; in after years it
was twice rewritten by the author, to accommodate it to the rapid
advances made by the science, and it is still one of our best textbooks
of chemistry. It has had a sale of about one hundred and fifty thousand
copies.
The publication of this book at once established its author's reputation
as a scientific writer, and in another way it marked an era in his life.
The long, distressing period of darkness now came to an end. Sight was
so far recovered in one eye that it became possible to go about freely,
to read, to recognize friends, to travel, and make much of life. I am
told that his face had acquired an expression characteristic of the
blind, but that expression was afterward completely lost. When I knew
him it would never have occurred to me that his sight was imperfect,
except perhaps as regards length of range.
Youmans' career as a scientific lecturer now began. His first lecture
was the beginning of a series on the relations of organic life to the
atmosphere. It was illustrated with chemical apparatus, and was given in
a private room in New York to an audience which filled the room.
Probably no lecturer ever faced his first audience without some
trepidation, and Youmans had not the mainstay and refuge afforded by a
manuscript, for his sight was never good enough to make such an aid
available for his lectures. At first the right words were slow in
finding their way to those ready lips, and his friends were beginning to
grow anxious, when all at once a happy accident broke the spell. He was
remarking upon the characteristic inertness of nitrogen, and pointing to
a jar of that gas on the table before him, when some fidgety movement of
his knocked the jar off the table. He improved the occasion with one of
his quaint _bons mots_, and, as there is nothing that greases the wheels
of life like a laugh, the lecture went on to a successful close.
This was the beginning of a busy career of seventeen years of lecturing,
ending in 1868; and I believe it is safe to say that few things were
done in all those years of more vital and lasting benefit to the
American people than this broadcast sowing of the seeds of scientific
thought in the lectures of Edward Youmans. They came just at the time
when the world was ripe for the doctrine of evolution, when all the
wondrous significance of the trend of scientific discovery since
Newton's time was beginning to burst upon men's minds. The work of Lyell
in geology, followed at length in 1859 by the Darwinian theory; the
doctrine of the correlation of forces and the consequent unity of
nature; the extension and reformation of chemical theory; the
simultaneous advance made in sociological inquiry, and in the conception
of the true aims and proper methods of education,--all this made the
period a most fruitful one for the peculiar work of such a teacher as
Youmans. The intellectual atmosphere was charged with conceptions of
evolution. Youmans had arrived at such conceptions in the course of his
study of the separate lines of scientific speculation which were now
about to be summed up and organized by Herbert Spencer into that system
of philosophy which marks the highest point to which the progressive
intelligence of mankind has yet attained. In the field of scientific
generalization upon this great scale, Youmans was not an originator; but
his broadly sympathetic and luminous mind moved on a plane so near to
that of the originators that he seized at once upon the grand scheme of
thought as it was developed, made it his own, and brought to its
interpretation and diffusion such a happy combination of qualities as
one seldom meets with. The ordinary popularizer of great and novel
truths is a man who comprehends them but partially, and illustrates them
in a lame and fragmentary way. But it was the peculiarity of Youmans
that while on the one hand he could grasp the newest scientific thought
so surely and firmly that he seemed to have entered into the innermost
mind of its author, on the other hand he could speak to the general
public in an extremely convincing and stimulating way. This was the
secret of his power, and there can be no question that his influence in
educating the American people to receive the doctrine of evolution was
great and widespread.
The years when Youmans was travelling and lecturing were the years when
the old lyceum system of popular lectures was still in its vigour. The
kind of life led by the energetic lecturer in those days was not that of
a Sybarite, as may be seen from a passage in one of his letters: "I
lectured in Sandusky, and had to get up at five o'clock to reach Elyria;
I had had but very little sleep. To get from Elyria to Pittsburg I must
take the five o'clock morning train, and the hotel darky said he would
_try_ to waken me. I knew what that meant, and so did not get a single
wink of sleep that night. Rode all day to Pittsburg, and had to lecture
in the great Academy of Music over footlights.... The train that left
for Zanesville departed at two in the morning. I had been assured a
hundred times (for I asked everybody I met) that I could get a
sleeping-car to Zanesville, and when I was all ready to start I was
informed that _this_ morning there was no sleeping-car. By the time I
reached here I was pretty completely used up."
Such a fatiguing life, however, has its compensations. It brings the
lecturer into friendly contact with the brightest minds among his fellow
countrymen in many and many places, and enlarges his sphere of influence
in a way that is not easy to estimate. Clearly, an earnest lecturer, of
commanding intelligence and charming manner, with a great subject to
teach, must have an opportunity for sowing seeds that will presently
ripen in a change of opinion or sentiment, in an altered way of looking
at things on the part of whole communities. No lecturer has ever had a
better opportunity of this sort than Edward Youmans, and none ever made
a better use of his opportunity. His gifts as a talker were of the
highest order. The commonest and plainest story, as told by Edward
Youmans, had all the breathless interest of the most thrilling romance.
Absolutely unconscious of himself, simple, straightforward, and
vehement, wrapped up in his subject, the very embodiment of faith and
enthusiasm, of heartiness and good cheer, it was delightful to hear
him. And when we join with all this his unfailing common sense, his
broad and kindly view of men and things, and the delicious humour that
kept flashing out in quaint, pithy phrases such as no other man would
have thought of, and such as are the despair of any one trying to
remember and quote them, we can seem to imagine what a power he must
have been with his lectures.
When such a man goes about for seventeen years, teaching scientific
truths for which the world is ripe, we may be sure that his work is
great, albeit we have no standard whereby we can exactly measure it. In
hundreds of little towns with queer names did this strong personality
appear and make its way and leave its effects in the shape of new
thoughts, new questions, and enlarged hospitality of mind, among the
inhabitants. The results of all this are surely visible to-day. In no
part of the English world has Herbert Spencer's philosophy met with such
a general and cordial reception as in the United States. This may no
doubt be largely explained by a reference to general causes; but as it
is almost always necessary, along with our general causes, to take into
the account some personal influence, so it is in this case. It is safe
to say that among the agencies which during the past fifty years have
so remarkably broadened the mind of the American people, very few have
been more potent than the gentle and subtle but pervasive work done by
Edward Youmans with his lectures, and to this has been largely due the
hospitable reception of Herbert Spencer's ideas.
It was in 1856 that Youmans fell in with a review of "Spencer's
Principles of Psychology," by Dr. Morell, in "The Medico-Chirurgical
Review." This paper impressed him so deeply that he at once sent to
London for a copy of the book, which had been published in the preceding
year. It will be observed that this was four years before the Darwinian
theory was announced in the first edition of the "Origin of
Species."[15]
After struggling for a while with the weighty problems of this book,
Youmans saw that the theory expounded in it was a long stride in the
direction of a general theory of evolution. His interest in this subject
received a new and fresh stimulus. He read "Social Statics," and began
to recognize Spencer's hand in the anonymous articles in the quarterlies
in which he was then announcing and illustrating various portions or
segments of his newly discovered law of evolution. One evening in
February, 1860, as Youmans was calling at a friend's house in Brooklyn,
the Rev. Samuel Johnson, of Salem, handed him the famous prospectus of
the great series of philosophical works which Spencer proposed to issue
by subscription. Mr. Johnson had obtained this from Edward Silsbee, who
was one of the very first Americans to become interested in Spencer. The
very next day Youmans wrote a letter to Spencer, offering his aid in
procuring American subscriptions and otherwise facilitating the
enterprise by every means in his power. With this letter and Spencer's
cordial reply began the lifelong friendship between the two men. It was
in that same month that I first became aware of Spencer's existence,
through a single paragraph quoted from him by Lewes, and in that
paragraph there was immense fascination. I had been steeping myself in
the literature of modern philosophy, starting with Bacon and Descartes,
and was then studying Comte's "Philosophie Positive," which interested
me as suggesting that the special doctrines of the several sciences
might be organized into a general body of doctrine of universal
significance. Comte's work was crude and often wildly absurd, but there
was much in it that was very suggestive. In May, 1860, in the Old Corner
Bookstore in Boston, I fell upon a copy of that same prospectus of
Spencer's works, and read it with exulting delight; for clearly there
was to be such an organization of scientific doctrine as the world was
waiting for. It appeared that there was some talk of Ticknor & Fields
undertaking to conduct the series in case subscriptions enough should be
received. Spencer preferred to have his works appear in Boston; but when
in the course of 1860 his book on "Education" was offered to Ticknor &
Fields, they declined to publish it,--which was, of course, a grave
mistake from the business point of view. Youmans, however, was not sorry
for this, for it gave him the opportunity to place Spencer's books where
he could do most to forward their success.
Some years before, during his blindness, his sister had led him one day
into the store of Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. in quest of a book, and Mr.
William Appleton had become warmly interested in him. I believe the firm
now look back to this chance visit as one of the most auspicious events
in their annals. Youmans became by degrees a kind of adviser as regarded
matters of publication, and it was largely through his far-sighted
advice that the Appletons entered upon the publication of such books as
those of Buckle, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Haeckel, and others of like
character; always paying a royalty to the authors, the same as to
American authors, in spite of the absence of an international copyright
law. As publishers of books of this sort the Appletons have come to be
preëminent. It is obvious enough nowadays that such books are profitable
from a business point of view; but thirty years and more ago this was by
no means obvious. We Americans were terribly provincial. Reprints of
English books and translations from French and German were sadly behind
the times. In the Connecticut town where I lived, people would begin to
wake up to the existence of some great European book or system of
thought after it had been before the world anywhere from a dozen to
fifty years. In those days, therefore, it required some boldness to
undertake the reprinting of new scientific books; and none have
recognized more freely than the Appletons the importance of the part
played by Youmans in this matter. His work as adviser to a great
publishing house and his work as lecturer reinforced each other, and
thus his capacity for usefulness was much increased.