Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/89

Rh displayed. It was too early for the awakening in science in America which really dated from the coming of Agassiz. In research among old Harvard catalogues, where David Henry Thoreau was entered at Room 32, Hollis, I noted lectures on minerology (sic), chemistry and anatomy for the senior year. In an interesting paper in Harvardiana for 1835, unsigned as were all of those secretive contributions of students, is a plea, entitled "Manual Labor System," denouncing the suggestion of manual work in college and urging outdoor life and study for exercise and education. The writer says;—"The pages of nature are ample enough and the lessons to be drawn from thence instructive enough to employ his highest thoughts and afford him endless subjects for study and reflection." Probably Thoreau never wrote for this college journal but the paper evidences the dawning interest in nature with which he was already inspired. His college studies, however, became a subtle, potent factor in his later authorship. Indifferent to the social and convivial life of the college town, he devoted himself to classic literature, reading assiduously at the well-chosen library of fifty thousand volumes. He afterwards frankly said that the library was the only part of his college training which gave him passing pleasure and lasting good.