526 EPHRATM WHITMAN GURNET. 



must trust for evidence of the loss which historical learning has 

 suffered. 



Reference has already been made to the importance of the juncture 

 at which Professor Giirney became Dean of Harvard College. Under 

 the administration of President Eliot, the University was entering 

 upon an era of extraordinary development, both material and intel- 

 lectual. In devising and carrying out the measures necessary for this 

 transformation, Professor Gurney was from the first a leading coun- 

 sellor ; and in assuming the office of Dean of the College Faculty 

 he took upon himself a share in their execution, for which only his 

 singular combination of qualities and attainments could have been 

 sufficient. la determining the action by which the teaching body 

 expanded its range of instruction, and, by the abandonment of every 

 scholastic tradition, adapted its system to a new university life, his 

 influence was powerful. The great range of scholarship of which he 

 had thorough command gave him an unequalled ability to compre- 

 hend and compare the capacities and the needs of many branches of 

 knowledge, and made him in a peculiar manner the trusted colleague 

 of all his associates, at a time when the supporters of the elder uni- 

 versity studies might well look with some doubt upon the growing 

 importance of the newer learning, and of the natural and physical 

 sciences. His opinion, never advanced as such except upon a delib- 

 erate survey of the whole field, formed by a judgment which on the 

 whole was cautious rather than conservative, never failed to weigh 

 heavily at the decisive moment in any otherwise doubtful balance ; nor 

 were the cases few in which his authority lightened for others the 

 responsibility of individual decision. 



How important the work done in the transformation of Harvard 

 University was, in its influence upon the higher education in America, 

 need not be considered here. Of the history of one great section of 

 this work, much will be found in the annual reports to the President 

 of the University made by Professor Gurney while Dean of the Col- 

 lege Faculty. But the reader will find in these reports few state- 

 ments of educational theory, and little discussion not required by the 

 practical questions of administration then to be dealt with. It was 

 characteristic of the man that, in all outward expression, the right 

 decision of the subject immediately in hand should be sufficient ; and 

 the mass of ripened opinions by which his own mind was fortified, and 

 which came to light in his conversation, he generally cared to display 

 only so far as was necessary in order to convince, in the accomplish- 

 ment of some definite object. 



