Nowadays the man in the street would expect that in Ireland the frequency of marriage would vary inversely with the price of potatoes, and the frequency of illegitimacy would vary directly with it,--that in France, or anywhere else, the ratio of unstamped letters dropped into the boxes, to those duly stamped, would be the same year in and year out; in other words, that the conduct of men in general is regulated by environment and determined by law. But when Fiske was in college, and these ideas were new, as far as anything can be new, and when Buckle brought out a book full of them and their supporting facts, they appealed at once to Fiske's exceptional powers of correlation--of tracing order in the history he had been reading, and in the life he was beginning intelligently to observe. The precocious boy's enthusiasm was greatly stirred, and yet his critical faculty did not lose its discrimination. He wrote an essay on Buckle which was praised by the best judges in England; and when Spencer came along sweeping all these ideas into the one colossal generalization of Evolution, Fiske was wild with delight. His own studies of language had been wide enough to enable him to apply to it the new generalization, and he wrote an essay on _The Evolution of Language_ which increased the effect of his Buckle essay on both sides of the Atlantic, and received the commendation of several leading men, including Spencer himself. How much in advance of the age these ideas then were, is well illustrated by the fact that somewhere about 1860, some of the authorities at Yale actually set the students, who were not Fiske's, as a theme for discussion: "Is language of divine or human origin?" This theme was not set by Whitney: he already knew better, and was very much out of gear with Yale because of the knowledge, though as far as his colleagues were concerned, he kept his out-of-gearness to himself. * * * * * Fiske was never absorbingly interested in the specific problems of the elevation of the less fortunate portion of mankind, but the wider philosophic and historic problems to which he was devoted include those specific ones. The widest of all, of course, is Evolution, and probably he did more to diffuse a knowledge of that than any man of his time except its two greatest discoverers. Had he lived to apply, as he proposed, the all-comprehending law to the history of our nation from the time it became one at Washington's inauguration, his help in the perplexities which now, next to the war, most beset us, would have been invaluable. But what he did live to accomplish is of a value that probably none of us can realize, and not many even suspect.