338 Report on a Course of Liberal Education. 



those who instruct in colleges, surpass all others in stupidity, 

 and are content to be forever grinding in the same mill, with 

 their eyes fixed on the path in which they are constantly 

 moving the same round. It is unnecessary here to go into 

 a general defence of our colleges, — a few statements re- 

 s()ecling this college will be sufficient. What Yale College 

 was in its infancy we are told, in part, in Chandler's Life 

 of Dr. Johnson, the first President of King's College, New- 

 York. Dr. Johnson graduated in 1714, and his biographer 

 probably derived his information respecting the college, as 

 it was at that time, from Dr. Johnson himself. " For many 

 years," says Dr. Chandler, " the utmost that was gener- 

 ally attempted, at the college, in classical learning, was to 

 construe five or six of Tully's orations, as many books of 

 Virgil, and part only of the Greek Testament, with some 

 chapters of the Hebrew Psalter. Common arithmetic, and a 

 little surveying, were the ne plus ultra of mathematical ac- 

 quirements. The logic, metaphysics, and ethics that were 

 then taught, were entangled in the scholastic cobwebs of a 

 few paltry systems, that would now be laid by as proper food 

 for worms. Indeed, at the time when Mr. Johnson took his 

 Bachelor's degree, the students had heard of a certain new 

 and strange philosophy, that was in vogue in England, and 

 the names of Descartes, Boyle, Locke, and Newton, had 

 reached them ; but they were not suffered to thmk that any 

 valuable improvements were to be expected from philosophi- 

 cal innovations, &c." 



From the peculiar prejudices of this writer, some of his 

 representations are to be received with important deduc- 

 tions ; but that his account of the college, at the time Dr. 

 Johnson was an undergraduate, so far as it respects the ex- 

 tent of the course of study, is substantially correct, appears 

 from other evidence altogether independent. Dr. Benjamin 

 Lord of Norwich in this state, in the year 1784, being then 

 ninety years old, wrote to President Stiles an account of the 

 college, as it was when he was a student. Dr. Lord gradu- 

 ated the same year as Dr. Johnson, that is, in 1714. In his 

 letter he says, " Books of the languages and sciences recited 

 in my time, were Tully and Virgil, Burgersdicius' and Ra- 

 mus' Logic, Pierson's Manuscript of Physics, &c. We re- 

 cited the Greek Testament, knew not Homer, (tc; recited 

 the Psalms in Hebrew. We recited Ames' Medulla on 

 Saturdays, and also his cases of Conscience sometimes. As 



