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 colors, 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. Prof. 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 text-book 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 sci-
