C92 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



important one that history has preserved, we take our leave of the 1 6th 

 President of Harvard College. Slight as it is, it presents the college 

 in a curious light, and in no respect more curious than in its relations 

 with the patient president who bore himself with such scholarly calm 

 through the turinoils of riotous days. It is pleasant to remember that 

 the last seventeen years of his life, from 1781 to 1797, were spent in 

 the congenial seclusion of a small country parsonage. 



After the completion of Mr. Hall's address, the President 

 read the following letter from Professor William W. Goodwin, 

 a former President of the Academy. 



Some of the pleasantest recollections of my first years as Tutor and 

 Professor are connected with the Academy, of which I was made a mem- 

 ber by the kindness of my beloved teacher and friend, Cornelius Conway 

 Felton, soon after I returned to Cambridge from Germany in 1856. 

 I shall never forget the enjoyment of the earliest meetings which I 

 attended. The first was at the house of Dr. Jacob Bigelow, then Presi- 

 dent of the Academy. Another memorable Meeting was when the 

 venerable Ex-Vice-President, Josiah Quincy, invited the Academy to 

 his house on Park street (I think it was on his ninetieth birthday), 

 and entertained us by reminiscences of his early life in Boston and of 

 his Presidency of Harvard College. After the meetings the Cambridge 

 party, among whom were apt to be Professors Felton, Lane, Levering, 

 Agassiz, and Jeffries Wyman, with Morrill Wyman, B. A. Gould and 

 others, hastened to Brattle street and filled the Cambridge omnibus to 

 overflowing ; or occasionally, when the moon was full, made up a party 

 to walk home to Cambridge. 



At about this time a controversy arose between some of its members 

 who felt that the increasing interest taken in the social meetings in 

 private houses interfered with the more important scientific duties of 

 the Academy as a learned society, and those who (like Professor 

 Felton) "could see no harm in a glass of wine and an oyster." The 

 social meetings became less and less frequent, however, when the 

 Academy became more pleasantly settled in quarters of its own, and 

 now, when we have a comfortable home in our own house in Boston, 

 the old controversy has become a matter of early history. 



I beg you to present to the Academy my deep regrets that I cannot 

 be with them on Wednesday evening. As one of its older members, 

 one who remembers always with pleasure that he had for a few years 

 the honor of being its President, I feel a just pride in its honorable 

 and useful past ; and I hope that, as the years bring round the anni- 



