OP ARTS AND SCIENCES. 615 



however, since the College possessed no apparatus worth mentioning, 

 and his two courses of lectures given in 1850 were illustrated by 

 material brought from the small private laboratory which he had 

 fitted up at home when a boy. 



At the end of this year it was decided to fill the Erviug Professor- 

 ship of Chemistry and Mineralogy, and the two most prominent candi- 

 dates were Cooke and David A. Wells, the first graduate in chemistry 

 of the Lawrence Scientific School, now so eminent for his work in 

 political economy. The election resulted in the choice of Cooke 

 on December 30, 1850, and he held this position till his death. He 

 was now only twenty-three years old, with barely a year and a half of 

 experience as a teacher, and a knowledge of chemistry the product of 

 his own studies unaided by any systematic instruction. With this 

 meagre outfit he was confronted with problems which would have 

 tasked the abilities of an old, experienced, and fully educated pro- 

 fessor. The chemical teaching in Harvard College had become 

 extinct, he must re-establish it. The College was wedded to methods 

 of teaching excellent for classics and mathematics, but entirely unfit 

 for a subject like chemistry ; he must displace these, and put in 

 their stead better methods, many of which were still to be invented. 

 Finally, he must help to raise science from its position as an unwel- 

 come interloper on the outskirts of the College course to an equality 

 with the humanities intrenched behind centuries of tradition. 



His first step after his appointment was to obtain leave of absence 

 for the remainder of the College year, which was well spent in Europe 

 buying apparatus and chemicals, mostly at his own expense, accord- 

 ing to an agreement between the Professors of the Medical School ; 

 but he also found time to improve his intellectual equipment by 

 attending the lectures of Regnault and Dumas, whose influence can 

 be traced in his strong leaning to chemical physics, and the care and 

 accuracy of his later work upon atomic weights. Regnault espe- 

 cially inspired him with the warmest affection, as is pleasantly shown 

 by the enthusiastic reverence with which he is invariably mentioned 

 in his book on Chemical Physics. With this work his systematic 

 instruction in chemistry, if it can be called such, began and ended, 

 and it is hard to believe in view of his achievements that it was all 

 crowded into six months, broken by many other necessary occu- 

 pations. 



On his return from Europe in 1851 he promptly accomplished his 

 first task, the re-establishment of chemical instruction in Harvard 

 College on its old recitation basis ; but it is a high tribute to his 



