Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/195

 CHAELES W. ELIOT Bt Chbistophbb B. Colbmak NOTHING stirs us more than a great achievement. In the exploits of others we feel our own possibilities re- vealed. The American people prides itself npon being a people of great achievements. On every hand we see great things brought to pass. We have converted the wildemesB into fertile farms ; we have spanned broad rivers and girded a continent with railroads ; we have dug canals to extend our great water courses and have at length united for commerce the two greatest oceans of the world ; we have built gigantic factories, and erected cities which stagger the imagination. The population of our metropolis alone surpasses the total population of the thirteen colonies when they declared them- selves an independent nation. Other achievements less spectacular and picturesque than these have been equally necessary to our material and intel- lectual growth. Not the least important among them has been the development of our great American universities. Our attention may well be challenged, therefore, by the fore- most figure in this development, the greatest educational lead- er of his generation, Charles W. Eliot. Mr. Eliot was chosen president of Harvard College in 1869. Not widely known at that time, he yet came to his position thoroughly prepared and admirably fitted for its tasks. Bom at Boston on March 20, 1834, he was but thirty-five years of age when he came to the presidency of the oldest college in the United States. He had been fitted for college at the Bos- tori Latin School, and had graduated at Harvard in 1853. He was tutor in mathematics in Harvard and, for the next five years, a graduate student of chemistry with Professor Josiah P. Cooke. Then for five years he was assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School, the scientific department of Harvard. He spent two years in the study of chemistry and of educational methods in Europe^