420 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



ministry, and of a brave struggle with the poverty which had 

 kept them from their goal." After a description of the village 

 and the mode of life in it, Prof. Shepard continues : " With 

 such surroundings, what now were our interior advantages ? 

 Whatever we may have represented them to outsiders, what- 

 ever we may have persuaded ourselves concerning them, they 

 were, in my day, extremely meagre. The teachers were few, 

 and in general were not distinguished in their departments. 

 Our library did not surpass the scholarly range of a country 

 clergyman in fair circumstances. Apparatus and collections 

 were unknown in our first year, and they had made but feeble 

 beginnings before our graduation. The only lectures which I 

 remember were the two annual courses of Prof. Amos Eaton, 

 in his day a distinguished botanist and geologist. 



" In Dr. Moore, a gentleman of suave manners, of true 

 Christian dignity, and of singular judgment in managing 

 youth, we had an admirable president. I venture to suspect 

 that he was the only college president in the United States 

 who, from the beginning, personally subscribed for the some- 

 what expensive numbers of the Journal of the Royal Institu- 

 tion of London. From this source, and others similar, he ap- 

 pears to have gained a prevision of the importance of the 

 modern sciences in education, and to him mainly are we in- 

 debted for the early foothold which they gained in the institu- 

 tion ; to him, at all events, we owed the presence of Prof. 

 Eaton. Rarely has college lecturer been more faithfully and 

 enthusiastically listened to than Prof. Eaton in his course on 

 chemistry and botany, together with his abridged course on 

 zoology. To supply the place of a text-book on the last-men- 

 tioned branch, he furnished us a highly useful printed sylla- 

 bus, drawn mainly from the great work of Cuvier, then wholly 

 inaccessible to us. ... There were doubtless deficiencies to 

 be regretted. In the larger and older universities we might 

 have found better teachers and richer stores of libraries and 

 collections, but in some unknown way, perhaps in the enthu- 

 siasm of comparatively solitary effort, compensation was made ; 

 and on the whole we may doubt whether higher life success 

 would have attended us had we launched from other ports." 



For a year after graduation he studied botany and miner- 

 alogy with Thomas Nuttall at Cambridge, and during most of 

 this time taught the same branches in Boston. His study of 



