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COPYRIGHT, 1879, BY HENRY HOLT & CO.

the solar comets-a theory which was received with applause by the Royal Society, and held its own for many years in the scientific world. His successor, after an interregnum, President Ezra Stiles (1777 to 1795), while lacking Dr. Clap's force, was even more versatile. Remarkable as a linguist, delivering the address at Yale's "splendid commencement" of 1781, in Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic, he kept abreast "of science, was the lifelong friend of Benjamin Franklin (who received an M.A. at Yale, and sent to New Haven the first printing-press ever set up in the town), worked an electric machine (Dr. Franklin's gift), could teach mathematics, natural philosophy, and astronomy as readily as Hebrew or the ology, and cherished the hope that after death he would be permitted to visit Saturn and study his rings.

These trivial personalities have a true significance, and are not merely curious bits of gossip about forgotten worthies. For down to the end of the eighteenth

century the President was Yale even more than Napoleon was the State. He it was who determined the character of the college, in which there were only two professional chairs, one in Divinity and one in Natural Philosophy and Mathematics, the other instructors being young tutors and the curriculum being still mediaval. This included originally, to summarize in a sentence Professor Schwab's careful study in the " Educational Review," Hebrew, Latin, and Greek in languages; elementary mathematics, extended finally to include surveying and astronomy; theology, logic, metaphysics, and disputation" five times a week in forensic or syllogistic form. The first text-books were the Old and New Testaments and Virgil. Later, Cicero and Horace were introduced, but not a single Greek classic. No wonder, when Dr. Dwight was a tutor, just before the Revolution, the "scholars," as they were then called, petitioned that he be permitted to instruct them in belles-lettres. Books were rare, and constituted the one

Read ancient authors o'er in vain, Nor taste one beauty they contain. Barlow's "Columbiad" was intense, like his career. Barlow was a type of the more adventurous Americans of the Revolutionary period, who found peace prosaic. An ex-war chaplain and ex-psalmodist, Barlow drifted to France and became prominent as a Girondist; then to London and held his own in a circle of wits of whom Priestley, West, Copley, and Horne Tooke are best remembered. Tiring of bohemianism, he made a fortune in speculation and was persuaded to accept the place of Minister to France at a critical period (1811). Going to Poland by invitation to meet Napoleon and negotiate a treaty, he lost his life from exposure during the retreat from Moscow.

Despite the cleverness, wit, and force that went into the making of America's first school of literature, Yale has remained, as Bulwer said of London, leonum arida nutrix. The occasional literary celebrity on her honor roll-Fenimore Cooper (whom the faculty did not permit to graduate), N. P. Willis, Donald G. Mitchell, Edmund C. Stedman, and Edmund Rowland Sill-are sporadic cases of finding one's self, not products of a favoring environment. But though Yale's first promise

the inspiration of patriotism of which it was born finds present recognition in the Memorial Gateway erected by the class of 1896 to the Yale dead of the Spanish war. It stands, as President Hadley pointed out at its dedication, for the persistence of a noble type, the type of Major Theodore Winthrop, the writer of gifts and charm who, far in advance of his men, fell gallantly in the charge at Great Bethel, and the type of Nathan Halethe one of the class of 1848, the other of the class of 1769.

The passing of the special literary movement at Yale marked the beginning of the scientific movement, one more in accord with Yale's real genius. In 1802 Benjamin Silliman was chosen to fill the professorship of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, just established--a chair he held for fifty years. During that halfcentury it is probably no exaggeration to say that Yale was the "scientific center" of America. Silliman popularized science somewhat as Gough popularized temperance, or Phillips the slavery question, delivering the first Lowell Institute course at Boston, and being widely in demand for years as a "platform attrac tion." For this work he had an exceptional aptitude. To a fine presence and pleasing address was added a sense of

humor, as when he used to tell his classes how he took Yale's original collection of minerals to Philadelphia in a candle-box, "to my distinguished friend Dr. Hare, who acted as my Adam, and named my animals for me." He could work with his hands and talk with his mouth at the same time, a trick," adds the Hon. Frederick J. Kingsbury, one of his students, "which any one who has not tried it will find not to be so easy as it looks. If anything with an experiment went wrong, instead of staring at it in blank astonishment, as I have seen men do, he would without a break go right on telling how and why the thing had failed and all about

it. In this way he frequently made a failure more instructive than a success.' But Silliman was far more than a successful lecturer. His indomitable enthusiasm as editor maintained, in the face of great discouragement, the "American Journal of Science," the authority of his name securing for its columns constant contributions from leading scientists abroad. Most of all, to the group of his special students, most prominent of whom was his son-inlaw, the late Professor Dana, the eminent geologist, is to be traced the origin of what is now the Sheffield School (established in 1847 and endowed by Joseph E. Sheffield in 1859), the pioneer school of

special scientific study in America. Yale's scientific prestige, dating with Silliman to the opening of the nineteenth century, was upheld to its end; for in Marsh, the paleontologist, Yale's name stands associated with the discovery of unique evidence for the doctrine of evolution-the famed horses with toes, examination of which led Huxley himself to revise his conclusions on the genealogy of the horse.

The scientific movement under Silliman was simply a conspicuous phase of the general modern movement at Yale under Timothy Dwight, who was President from 1795 to 1817. The Dwight of tradition is associated with a certain "Systematic Theology," an elucidation of the Calvinism of his grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, a popular work in Scotland, as Ian Maclaren loves to testify. But it was the untraditional Dwight who, led by his appreciation of the discoveries of Lavoisier and Sir Humphry Davy, established the chair to which he chose Silliman because he was a young man of promise, providing for his first scientific education and later sending him to Europe to become a thorough specialist, quite in the modern manner. The act was representative. Dwight was receptive to new ideas, versatile, quick of wit, a practical man in touch with men and affairs, no less than the preacher and orator. While chaplain

in the Revolutionary army he wrote patriotic songs of wide popularity. Later he proved himself a good man of business, and made so marked a success in the Legislature that he was urged to enter Congress. Still later, as a quiet country pastor on Greenfield Hill (back of Bridgeport) he established a famous academy in which young women received the same instruction in the same branches as young men- a recognition of the "higher education" for women antedating the nineteenth century. Dwight then initiated a régime of progress as President of Yale. He abolished "fagging," the services freshmen were required to render upper classmen-a relic of undemocratic times before the Revolution when the names of students were entered in the catalogue according to the social precedence of their families. He enlarged the curriculum by adding English literature and rhetoric. He substituted professorships for the system of almost exclusive teaching by tutors. He founded the medical school, and took initial steps toward founding schools of theology and law, thus anticipating the university. He helped notably by his forcible sermons in checking the drift among educated young men toward what is loosely called "French Deism," seductively associated with notions of liberty and with leadership in public life.