Cambridge Sketches | Page 5

to 1860 Harvard University practically stagnated. The
world about it progressed, but the college remained unchanged. Its
presidents were excellent men, but they had lived too long under the
academic shade. They lacked practical experience in the great world.
There were few lectures in the college course, and the recitations were
a mere routine. The text-books on philosophical subjects were narrow
and prejudiced. Modern languages were sadly neglected; and the
tradition that a French instructor once entertained his class by telling
them his dreams, if not true, was at least characteristic. The sons of
wealthy Bostonians were accustomed to brag that they had gone
through college without doing any real studying. To the college faculty
politics only meant the success of Webster and the great Whig party.
The anti-slavery agitation was considered inconvenient and therefore
prejudicial. During the struggle for free institutions in Kansas, the
president of Harvard College undertook to debate the question in a
public meeting, but he displayed such lamentable ignorance that he was
soon obliged to retire in confusion.
The war for the Union, however, waked up the slumbering university,
as it did all other institutions and persons. Rev. Thomas Hill was
chosen president in 1861, and was the first anti-slavery president of the
college since Josiah Quincy; and this of itself indicated that he was in
accord with the times,--had not set his face obstinately against them.
He was not so practical a man as President Quincy, but he was one of
the best scholars in America. His administration has not been looked
upon as a success, but he served to break the ice and to open the way
for future navigation. He accepted the position with definite ideas of
reform; but he lacked skill in the adaptation of means to ends. He was
determined to show no favoritism to wealth and social position, and he
went perhaps too far in the opposite direction. One day when the
workmen were digging the cellar of Gray's Hall, President Hill threw
off his coat, seized a shovel, and used it vigorously for half an hour or
more. This was intended as an example to teach the students the dignity
of labor; but they did not understand it so. At the faculty meetings he
carried informality of manner to an excess. He depended too much on
personal influence, which, as George Washington said formerly,

"cannot become government." He wrote letters to the Sophomores
exhorting them not to haze the Freshmen, and, as a consequence, the
Freshmen were hazed more severely than ever. Then he suspended the
Sophomores in a wholesale manner, many of them for slight offences.
However, he stopped the foot- ball fights, and made the examinations
much more strict than they had been previously. He endeavored to
inculcate the true spirit of scholarship among the students,--not to study
for rank but from a genuine love of the subject. The opposition that his
reforms excited made him unpopular, and Freshmen came to college so
prejudiced against him that all his kindness and good will were wasted
upon them.
"There goes the greatest man in this country," said a fashionable
Boston youth, one day in the spring of 1866. It was Louis Agassiz
returning from a call on President Hill. Such a statement shows that the
speaker belonged to a class of people called Tories, in 1776, and who
might properly be called so still. As a matter of fact, Agassiz had long
since passed the meridian of his reputation, and his sun was now not far
from setting. He had returned from his expedition to South America
with a valuable collection of fishes and other scientific materials; but
his theory of glaciers; which he went there to substantiate, had not been
proven. Darwin's "Origin of Species" had already swept his nicely-
constructed plans of original types into the fire of futile speculation.
Yet Agassiz was a great man in his way, and his importance was
universally recognized. He had given a vigorous and much-needed
impetus to the study of geology in America, and as a compendium of
all the different branches of natural history there was nobody like him.
In his lifelong single-minded devotion to science he had few equals and
no superiors. He cared not for money except so far as it helped the
advancement of his studies. For many years Madam Agassiz taught a
select school for young ladies (to which Emerson, among others, sent
his daughters), in order to provide funds for her husband to carry on his
work. It is to be feared that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was
rather stingy to him. Edward Everett once made an eloquent address in
his behalf to the legislature, but it had no effect. Louis Napoleon's
munificent offers could not induce him to return to Paris, for