OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 335 



thirty years in the College service. When I was elected President he 

 was fifty -six, — a time of life at which many men become impatient of 

 changes which seriously affect their own habits of work. Yet Pro- 

 fessor Lovering welcomed the project of moving the entire physical 

 establishment from its narrow quarters in University Hall to larger 

 rooms in Harvard Hall. He personally arranged the lower floor of 

 Harvard Hall to receive the Department of Physics, and was highly 

 content with the new accommodations of the department when the 

 transfer was completed, in 1870. But the department grew apace, 

 and the great gift of Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge for the construction of 

 a new physical laboratory made it possible to provide the department 

 with larger quarters still, and opened the way to a great increase both 

 of the teaching and of the investigation which it carried on. At the 

 age of seventy-one Professor Lovering entered heartily into this 

 large undertaking, brought to it a flexible and fertile mind, moved 

 again from Harvard Hall to the Jefferson Physical Laboratory, and 

 was glad to be appointed the first Director of that ample establish- 

 ment. 



He had been all his life an advocate of a single prescribed curriculum 

 for Harvard College, whereby every student should pursue the same 

 subjects ; but after he was established as Director of the Jefferson 

 Physical Laboratory, and had at his disposition an admirable lecture- 

 room and a much enlarged cabinet of apparatus, I asked him one day 

 if he would give some lectures to the Freshmen on general physics ; 

 for I wanted the Freshmen to have the advantage of his singular 

 clearness of exposition. He asked if the Freshmen were not required 

 to attend those lectures, — a question which then could only be an- 

 swered in the affirmative. Whereupon he refused to give the lectures, 

 saying that he would never again lecture in a required course, or to 

 an audience whose attendance was required. 



As I look back upon his life, it seems to me that it was to an ex- 

 traordinary degree independent and self-contained. While entirely 

 devoted to Harvard University as an institution, and inclined by tem- 

 perament to support the constituted authorities of the University, he 

 was nevertheless peculiarly independent in his own professorship, and 

 had been ever since he was first elected to his chair, at the age of 

 twenty-five. He served the College under seven Presidents, and I 

 am sure that they all found him, as I did, considerate, firm but never 

 factious in opposition, and loyal in support. His religions opinions 

 were the quintessence of independence, and they were held with a 

 firmness which no influence, however near and strong, could shake. 



