832 PROCEEDINGS OP THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



We are convened this evening to express our sorrow for the death 

 of our late President, and to offer our tribute to his memory. While 

 it belongs to me officially to lead in the proceedings of the meeting, 

 there is a certain fitness in my doing so, as my knowledge of Mr. 

 Lovering antedated that of any one else here present. Most of you 

 were his pupils ; he was my pupil. In his Senior year in college his 

 class recited in Astronomy to me. My only remembrance of him in 

 the class-room is that he was one of the three or four on whom I 

 relied to do credit to the class and' their teacher in the oral examina- 

 tion at the end of the term. But he was brought into closer relation 

 with me in another department. With three or four of his classmates 

 he studied Hebrew with me for that entire year, and for that purpose 

 spent three hours a week in my room. I then learned to admire the 

 diligence, promptness, and accuracy which have marked his life-work 

 ever since. He became, so far as was possible in a single year, a pro- 

 ficient in that language, which many who ought to be conversant with 

 it find so hard to learn and so easy to forget. 



Immediately after graduating he entered the Divinity School, and 

 had nearly completed his preparation for the ministry when, in con- 

 sequence of Professor Farrar's illness, he was requested to continue 

 and complete a course of lectures in the department of Physics. 

 Professor Farrar became a chronic invalid, and the place which Mr. 

 Lovering first filled in an emergency he held, as Tutor and Professor, 

 for fifty-three years. It was no small thing to succeed Professor 

 Farrar. Those who heard his lectures, of whom few survive, were 

 wont to speak of him as the most eloquent of men. Yet from the very 

 first, both in Physics and in Astronomy, Mr. Lovering won a reputation 

 that gave him a foremost rank as a scientific lecturer, which remained 

 his when the grandchildren of his early classes sat under the wordfall 

 still fresh and bright, because both old and ever new. 



I speak here not only from abundant testimony, but from my own 

 hearing. While the Lyceum was still an educational institution and 

 enlisted the best men in its service, I had the pleasure of listening to 

 several of his astronomical lectures, and at the same time of receiving 

 him as my guest. I then could recognize at once the thoroughness 

 of his scientific scholarship, his clearness of apprehension, his unsur- 

 passed teaching power, and his gifts of style and manner, which 

 could not but secure for him a marvellously strong hold on an 

 intelligent audience. 



Since my return to Cambridge I have been intimately associated 

 with him, and these years have given me constant, and, were there 



