BENJAMIN PEIRCE 113 



hint was so tactfully conveyed that I was neither vexed nor 

 amused, but rather grieved at his preposterous state of mind. 

 Whenever we met in after years, the dear old fellow always 

 greeted me with a certain distinguished consideration such as 

 you give and have from your enemy under a flag of truce. I 

 shall have more to say of this curious state of mind of the Anti- 

 slavery people further on in this narrative. 



Of the other men who were in some measure my teachers 

 while I was formally a pupil, I have the clearest and most de- 

 lightful memories of Benjamin Peirce, professor of mathematics 

 and astronomy. I was never in his classes, they were re- 

 served for college men, but whenever there was a lecture to 

 which I had access I heard him, with a greedy half -comprehen- 

 sion. He had a penetrating mathematical mind, compounded 

 with a vigorous constructive imagination. I recall a course of 

 lectures by him in which he dealt with a confounding variety 

 of subjects, including curves and billiards, winding up with a 

 drawing on the blackboard to which as a finale he with great 

 effectiveness pointed, saying: "If an archangel had to make a 

 universe he would do it in that formula." This made a vast 

 impression on my mind at the time; it was long after that I 

 came to see that your mathematical, like other mills, gives 

 forth no more than you put into it, however changed in shape 

 the product may be, and that the aforesaid formula held no 

 more than certain human concepts of energy, matter, and law, 

 so that even an archangel would find it a task to make any- 

 thing whatever out of them. During my undergraduate days 

 my relations with Peirce were limited, partly because I had no 

 adequate preparation to follow his vast excursions, but more 

 for the reason that he and Agassiz were enemies, with occa- 

 sional intermissions of loving friendship, and as in the case of 

 Gray I found it best to bide with my own lot. After I became 

 a teacher, our relations were intimate and to me largely profit- 

 able in wide understandings. 



Among those who came to Agassiz with the broadening of 



