WILLIAM WATSON GOODWIN. 



(Read January 3, 1913.) 



William Watson Goodwin, a member of the American Philo- 

 sophical Society since 1895, was born Alay 9, 183 1, at Concord, 

 Mass., and died June 15, 1912, at Cambridge. For fifty-six years 

 he stood in some official connection with Harvard College. A grad- 

 uate of the class of 1851, he was tutor in Greek and Latin from 1856 

 to 1857, tutor in Greek from 1857 to i860, from i860 to 1901 Eliot 

 professor of Greek literature, from 1901 to 1912 professor emer- 

 itus, and from 1903 to 1909 overseer of the university. Even after 

 his resignation of the Eliot professorship in 1901, his zeal did not 

 permit him to remain inactive, and for seven years his colleagues 

 gladly accepted his offer to continue his course on Plato and Aristotle. 



In the history of education in America few men have exceeded 

 Goodwin's period of service; and few have conferred greater dis- 

 tinction on American scholarship. His life is no exception to the 

 rule that the annals of a scholar's career are short and simple. His 

 many years were spent in unremitting and unobtrusive labor for the 

 welfare of Harvard in a period fruitful in far-reaching changes, a 

 period that witnessed at one end the decline of the old type of Amer- 

 ican college, and at the other the growth of the American university. 

 He was clear-sighted in his judgment and temperate in his reasoning 

 alike when he advocated, or when he opposed, the policies that shaped 

 the conduct of Harvard University to its present estate. 



But it is as an Hellenist that his name will live, for directly and 

 indirectly as an interpreter of the literature and language of ancient 

 Greece, he had a large influence on the temper and conscience of 

 classical scholarship in the United States. 



In the middle of the last century our native classical scholarship 

 had scarcely awakened to the possibility of the independence born of 

 original research. A leisurely interest in the classics as the humani- 

 ties, a somewhat torpid belief in their efficiency as a discipline for all 



