30 Kansas Academy of Science. 



them to the Harvard curriculum. To him came the necessity 

 of shaping and developing the entire instruction in chemistry, 

 and how well he succeeded the history of that department 

 shows. A member of his first class, and later assistant in 

 the department, was Doctor Eliot; and I have no doubt that 

 the influence and efforts of Professor Cooke had much to do in 

 molding the ideas and assisting the labors of President Eliot 

 in the development of Harvard from college to a great Ameri- 

 can university. 



Professor Cooke's contributions to Harvard and to Ameri- 

 can science are his services as a teacher, as an investigator, 

 and as an exponent of scientific culture. 



The first duty of a professor at that time, as it is now, in 

 the American college is toward the actual instruction in his 

 department, and from this standpoint Cooke accomplished 

 much in bettering the methods and aims of scientific teaching. 

 He developed in the college the laboratory method of teaching 

 physical science. Silliman and Hare had followed a system 

 of rather florid lectures, profusely illustrated with interesting 

 experiments, but so far as actual manipulation was concerned 

 the student remained a receptive, possibly, but passive, agent. 

 Cooke sought to develop in the student by these laboratory 

 methods the power of close and accurate observation and the 

 ability to reason clearly from these observations, an aim 

 which is the concrete essence of the value of all science train- 

 ing. Again, he sought to make chemistry not only a descrip- 

 tive but an exact and disciplinary study. In this connection 

 it is interesting to note that Professor Cooke published, in 

 1855, a little book on chemical equations and problems, as a 

 drill for his class in the exact quantitative relations in chem- 

 istry. This is the first book of the kind with which I am 

 acquainted, and it shows his desire to promote the rigid ac- 

 curacy which forms the basis of any adequate science teaching. 



To most of us only one gift is granted — ^that of adding by 

 dint of much labor some new fact to the ever-increasing store 

 of knowledge, but to some few there is given a clearer vision, 

 which enables them to assort these scattered facts and derive 

 from them a general law. To a certain degree this latter 

 faculty was granted to Cooke. In 1854 he published a paper 

 on "The Relation Between the Atomic Weights." Here he ar- 

 ranged the elements in a homologous series, which was to show 

 the relation between them as does such a series in organic 



