Edmund Fisk Green, later famous as John Fiske, was born of excellent New England stock at Hartford, Connecticut, on March 30, 1842. His mother was early widowed, and went to New York to teach, leaving her son with her mother in Middletown. When he was thirteen, his mother married in New York, and this change in her surname probably has something to do with the change in his, to that originally borne by the grandmother with whom he continued to live. The grandmother's father, John Fisk, was a remarkable man, and so his Christian name went with the surname. The young John Fiske (the _e_ was his own addition when he found that it had been used by his earlier ancestors) was precocious, as, despite many assertions to the contrary, great scholars and geniuses generally have been; but unlike Mill and Spencer--the cotemporaries he nearest resembled--Fiske had not the benefit in his early education of any exceptionally competent guide. From childhood up, however, he stood out from his companions. He had the usual schooling, interspersed with some special tutoring, and during two considerable intervals he pursued his studies unaided. All the while that his formal studies were going on, he read ravenously, and, from a very early age, only things worth reading. Thus in childhood he began the accumulation of what became a very exceptional private library. When Fiske was fourteen, he joined the Congregational Church in Middletown, and for a time he was very religious indeed, taking an active part in the wave of "revival" which swept over the country two years later, in 1858. But early in 1859 he was reading Gibbon, Grote, Humboldt, and Buckle, and questioning the dogmas of Christianity, and quite probably was going through the reaction from the "revival," which, throughout the country, was about as great as the revival itself; and it was not long before Fiske abandoned the dogmas altogether. But his reverence for all in the religion that was worth the attention of a reasoning being, never left him; and through life he even used its terminology to a degree that was sometimes hardly consistent with his fundamental convictions. He became also far the most effective builder yet known of the new religious superstructure legitimately based on the philosophy which, at about the time we speak of, was removing from many minds the traditional bases of religion. Fiske's infidelity led to his social ostracism in Middletown, but forty years later, the place had so far advanced that when it celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, it invited Fiske to be the orator of the occasion. In 1860 he entered Harvard. Later, of Darwin he said: "There is now and then a mind--perhaps one in four or five millions--which in early youth thinks the thoughts of mature manhood." Such a mind was emphatically Fiske's own: while he was still an undergraduate, two of his essays attracted attention on both sides of the water.