JOHN DANIEL RUNKLE. 729 



erection of a gymnasium, including a lunch-room ; the admission of 

 women as students. 



In 1878 Dr. Runkle resigned the presidency of the Institute and spent 

 the following two years in Europe. 



It had been President Runkle's merit to be the first to appreciate the 

 American need of mechanic arts instruction based on principles already 

 successfully applied in Russia. He was primarily interested in it as an 

 invaluable addition to existing engineering courses, but he also saw 

 clearly its great potential significance for general secondary education, 

 and so far as possible, under pressure of other needs, demonstrated this 

 by the inauguration of the School of Mechanic Arts, in which boys of 

 high-school age were offered a two years' course, including mathematics, 

 English, French, history, mechanical and freehand drawing, and shop- 

 work. His visit to Europe enabled him to make a study of Continental 

 schools of similar purpose ; and the results of this study are embodied in 

 a paper presented to the Society of Arts in April, 1881, on " Technical 

 and Industrial Education Abroad," in an extended contribution to the 

 Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education for 1880-81, and in a 

 " Report on Industrial Education " in 1884. Others have taken a more 

 directly prominent share in the introduction and extension of mechanic 

 arts or manual training in primary and secondary schools, but the actual 

 experiment initiated by him in Boston had in its time wide influence and 

 imitation. 



As a teacher of mathematics, Professor Runkle found his highest use- 

 fulness and most congenial vocation, — a vocation to be happily continued 

 for not less thau twenty-one years. His teaching was characterized by 

 stimulating, luminous, unconventional exposition, by quick incisive ques- 

 tioning, by warm personal interest in his students, and by a constant 

 substratum of uplifting earnestness and dignity. None of his students 

 could fail to acquire admiring affection ; very few could withstand the 

 incentive to work. 



Professor Runkle was a man of much intellectual quickness and 

 strength, of ardent, but in later years serene, temperament, of warm and 

 generous affections, of cordial, unaffected courtesy, in all the relations of 

 life a sincere and loyal gentleman. Throughout his early and middle 

 life he was a pioneer, first in the struggle for his own education and that 

 of his brothers, next in the establishment and continuance of a much- 

 needed, but, as it turned out, premature mathematical journal, then and 

 for many years in the development of the Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, and the introduction of education in the mechanic arts. In 



