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Rh and Joseph Buckminster (1751–1812) and William Ellery Channing were leaders of the conservative Unitarians, and Joseph Stevens Buckminster (1784–1812), James Freeman Clarke, and Theodore Parker were liberal leaders. Of the “Transcendentalists,” Emerson, Francis Henry Hedge (1805–1890), Clarke, Convers Francis (1795–1863), Parker, Thoreau and Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892) were Harvard graduates. Longfellow’s professorship at Harvard identified him with it rather than with Bowdoin; Oliver Wendell Holmes was professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard in 1847–1882; and Lowell, a Harvard alumnus, was Longfellow’s successor in 1855–1886 as Smith Professor of the French and Spanish languages and literatures. Ticknor and Charles Eliot Norton are other important names in American literary criticism. The historians Sparks, Bancroft, Hildreth, Palfrey, Prescott, Motley and Parkman were graduates of Harvard, as were Edward Everett, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips.

In organization and scope of effort Harvard has grown, especially after 1869, under the direction of President Charles W. Eliot, to be in the highest sense a university; but the “college” proper, whose end is the liberal culture of undergraduates, continues to be in many ways the centre of university life, as it is the embodiment of university traditions. The medical school (in Boston) dates from 1782, the law school from 1817, the divinity school (though instruction in theology was of course given from the foundation of the college) from 1819, and the dental school (in Boston) from 1867. The Bussey Institution at Jamaica Plain was established in 1871 as an undergraduate school of agriculture, and reorganized in 1908 for advanced instruction and research in subjects relating to agriculture and horticulture. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences dates from 1872, the Graduate School of Applied Science (growing out of the Lawrence Scientific School) from 1906, and the Graduate School of Business Administration (which applies to commerce the professional methods used in post-graduate schools of medicine, law, &c.) from 1908. The Lawrence Scientific School, established in 1847, was practically abolished in 1907–1908, when its courses were divided between the College (which thereafter granted a degree of S.B.) and the Graduate School of Applied Science, which was established in 1906 and gives professional degrees in civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, mining, metallurgy, architecture, landscape architecture, forestry, applied physics, applied chemistry, applied zoology and applied geology. A school of veterinary medicine, established in 1882, was discontinued in 1901. The university institutions comprise the botanic garden (1807) and the (Asa) Gray herbarium (1864); the Arnold arboretum (1872), at Jamaica Plain, for the study of arboriculture, forestry and dendrology; the university museum of natural history, founded in 1859 by Louis Agassiz as a museum of comparative zoology, enormously developed by his son, Alexander Agassiz, and transferred to the university in 1876, though under an independent faculty; the Peabody museum of American archaeology and ethnology, founded in 1866 by George Peabody; the William Hayes Fogg art museum (1895); the Semitic museum (1889); the Germanic Museum (1902), containing rich gifts from Kaiser Wilhelm II., the Swiss government, and individuals and societies of Germanic lands; the social museum (1906); and the astronomical observatory (1843; location 42° 22′ 48″ N. lat., 71° 8′ W. long.), which since 1891 has maintained a station near Arequipa, Peru. A permanent summer engineering camp is maintained at Squam Lake, New Hampshire. In Petersham, Massachusetts, is the Harvard Forest, about 2000 acres of hilly wooded country with a stand in 1908 of 10,000,000 ft. B.M. of merchantable timber (mostly white pine); this forest was given to the university in 1907, and is an important part of the equipment of the division of forestry. The university library is the largest college library in the country, and from its slow and competent selection is of exceptional value. In 1908 it numbered, including the various special libraries, 803,800 bound volumes, about 496,600 pamphlets, and 27,450 maps. Some of its collections are of great value from associations or special richness, such as Thomas Carlyle’s collection on Cromwell and Frederick the Great; the collection on folk-lore and medieval romances, supposed to be the largest in existence and including the material used by Bishop Percy in preparing his Reliques; and that on the Ottoman empire. The law library has been described by Professor A. V. Dicey of Oxford as “the most perfect collection of the legal records of the English people to be found in any part of the English-speaking world.” There are department libraries at the Arnold arboretum, the Gray herbarium, the Bussey Institution, the astronomical observatory, the dental school, the medical school, the law school, the divinity school, the Peabody museum, and the museum of comparative zoology. In 1878 the library published the first of a valuable series of Bibliographical Contributions. Other publications of the university (apart from annual reports of various departments) are: the Harvard Oriental Series (started 1891), Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (1890), Harvard Theological Review (1907), the Harvard Law Review (1889), Harvard Historical Studies (1897), Harvard Economic Studies (1906), Harvard Psychological Studies (1903), the Harvard Engineering Journal (1902), the Bulletin (1874) of the Bussey Institution, the Archaeological and Ethnological Papers (1888) of the Peabody museum, and the Bulletin (1863), Contributions and Memoirs (1865) of the museum of comparative zoology. The students’ publications include the Crimson (1873), a daily newspaper; the Advocate (1831), a literary bi-weekly; the Lampoon (1876), a comic bi-weekly; and the Harvard Monthly (1885), a literary monthly. The Harvard Bulletin, a weekly, and the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine (1892), a quarterly, are published chiefly for the alumni.

In 1908–1909 there were 743 officers of instruction and administration (including those for Radcliffe) and 5250 students (1059 in 1869), the latter including 2238 in the college, 1641 in the graduate and professional schools, and 1332 in the summer school. Radcliffe College, for women, had 449 additional students. The whole number of degrees conferred up to 1905 was 31,805 (doctors of science and of philosophy by examination, 408; masters of arts and of science by examination, 1759). The conditions of the time when Harvard was a theological seminary for boys, governed like a higher boarding school, have left traces still discernible in the organization and discipline, though no longer in the aims of the college. The average age of students at entrance, only 14 years so late as 1820, had risen by 1890 to 19 years, making possible the transition to the present régime of almost entire liberty of life and studies without detriment, but with positive improvement, to the morals of the student body. A strong development toward the university ideal marked the opening of the 19th century, especially in the widening of courses, the betterment of instruction, and the suggestions of quickening ideas of university freedom, whose realization, along with others, has come since 1870. The elimination of the last vestiges of sectarianism and churchly discipline, a lessening of parietal oversight, a lopping off of various outgrown colonial customs, a complete reconstruction of professional standards and methods, the development of a great graduate school in arts and sciences based on and organically connected with the undergraduate college, a great improvement in the college standard of scholarship, the allowance of almost absolute freedom to students in the shaping of their college course (the “elective” system), and very remarkable material prosperity marked the administration (1869–1909) of President Eliot. In the readjustment in the curricula of American colleges of the elements of professional training and liberal culture Harvard has been bold in experiment and innovation. With Johns Hopkins University she has led the movement that has transformed university education, and her influence upon secondary education in America has been incomparably greater than that of any other university. Her entrance requirements to the college and to the schools of medicine, law, dentistry and divinity have been higher than those of any other American university.