than he in expounding the theory in
America. Standing permanently for his work in this field are his books,
"Excursions of an Evolutionist" and "Darwinism, and Other Essays." One
of his first important works was "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy" (1874),
and in more recent years "The Destiny of Man" and "The Idea of God"
speak forth very distinctly, not as interpretations, but as his own
contributions to the progress of philosophic thought. One other phase of
the use to which Mr. Fiske's mind has been put should surely be
mentioned in any summary of his qualifications for writing histories. He
is extremely fond of hearing and telling good stories. His book on
"Myths and Myth-makers" (1872) gave early evidence of this fondness, and
surely there is the very spirit of the lover of tales in the Dedication
of the book, "To my dear Friend, William D. Howells, in remembrance of
pleasant autumn evenings spent among were-wolves and trolls and nixies."
Thus, besides the ability to see a story in all its bearings, Mr. Fiske
has the gift of telling it effectively,--a golden power without which
all the learning in the world would serve an historian as but so much
lead.

But all of these works preceding Mr. Fiske's historical writings did not
come out of nothing. His mental acquirements as a young man and boy were
very extraordinary, and give to the last stage of his career at which we
shall look--the earliest--perhaps the greatest interest of all. A
description of it without a knowledge of what followed would be all too
apt to remind readers whose memories go back far enough of the
instances, all too common, of men whose early promise is not fulfilled.
_Summa cum laude_ graduates settle down into lives of timid routine that
leads to nothing, just as often as the idle dreamers who stay
consistently at the foot of their classes wake up when the vital contact
with the world takes place, and do something astonishingly good. These,
however, are the exceptions. A development like Mr. Fiske's follows the
lines of nature.

Happily, there were books in the house in which he was brought up. At
the age of seven he was reading Rollin, Josephus, and Goldsmith's
Greece. Much of Milton, Pope, and Bunyan, and nearly all of Shakespeare
he had read before he was nine; histories of many lands before eleven.
At this age he filled a quarto blank book of sixty pages with a
chronological table, written from memory, of events between 1000 B. C.
and 1820 A.