wrote reviews of them, and by no means in the usual perfunctory way; his reviews and notices were turned out by the score, and scattered about in the magazines and newspapers where they would do the most good. Whenever he found another writer who could be pressed into the service, he would give him Spencer's books, kindle him with a spark from his own magnificent enthusiasm, and set him to writing for the press. The most indefatigable vender of wares was never more ruthlessly persistent in advertising for lucre's sake than Edward Youmans in preaching in a spirit of the purest disinterestedness the gospel of evolution. As long as he lived, Mr. Spencer had upon this side of the Atlantic an alter ego ever on the alert with vision like that of a hawk for the slightest chance to promote his interests and those of his system of thought.
Among the allies thus enlisted at that early time were Mr. George Ripley and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, both of whom did good service, in their different ways, in awakening public interest in the doctrine of evolution. In those days of the civil war it was especially hard to keep up the list of subscribers in an abstruse philosophical publication of apparently interminable length. Mr. Youmans now and then found it needful to make a journey in the interests of the work, and it was on one of these occasions, in November, 1893, that I made his acquaintance. I had already published, in 1861, an article in one of the quarterly reviews in which Mr. Spencer's work was referred to; and another in 1863, in which the law of evolution was illustrated in connection with certain problems of the science of language. The articles were anonymous, as was then the fashion, and Mr. Youmans's curiosity was aroused. There were so few people then who had any conception of what Mr. Spencer's work meant, that they could have been counted on one's fingers. At that time I knew of only three—the late Prof. Gurney, of Harvard; Mr. George Roberts, now an eminent patent lawyer in Boston; and Mr. John Clark, now of the Prang Educational Company. I have since known that there were at least two or three others about Boston, among others, my learned friend the Rev. W. R. Alger, besides several in other parts of the country. "When we sometimes ventured to observe that Mr. Spencer's work was as great as Newton's, and that his theory of evolution was going to remodel human thinking upon all subjects whatever, people used to stare at us and take us for idiots. Any one member of such a small community was easy to find; and I have always dated a new era in my life from the Sunday afternoon when Mr. Youmans came to my room in Cambridge. It was the beginning of a friendship such as hardly comes but once to a man. At that first meeting I knew nothing of him except that he was the author of a text-book of chemistry
