Proceedings of the Inauguration 
41 
“Let them try experiments at Harvard, and we will try to profit 
by them. They are better able to experiment than we are.” Is 
not the curriculum at best an experiment? President Harper 
once said, “What is the college for, if it is not to experiment?” 
We think the curriculum of the early college — the cur- 
riculum of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and Philosophy— as aimed 
to accomplish the ends of culture, as though it had no immediate 
and practical purpose. We should not forget that at the time 
of its establishment the old curriculum was intensely practical. 
It prepared directly for the professions of the day. It was a 
training in Latin, the common language of scholarship, in Greek, 
the language of the best literature and together with mathe- 
matics and philosophy constituted a practical preparation for 
the professors of law, medicine and theology. The number of 
its program of studies and prepare its students to serve their 
time and generation efficiently and well. 
As you have already been told, the greater part of my life 
has been spent in the study and in the teaching of Physics. I 
love that study because it possesses so much of beauty and casts 
such a benign influence upon the mind of him who pursues it. 
It possesses the power to awaken a profound feeling of rever- 
ence toward God. The revelations of the laboratory are so 
wonderful one cannot escape the feeling that the Creator has 
spread His wonderful works before us that He might draw men 
to Himself. 
This College escaped to a very remarkable degree the 
curious and discouraging opposition to science which in many 
institutions grew out of the misconceptions of the religious 
world. These misunderstandings first arose through a false 
natural science which had been written before the methods of 
Bacon and the experimental work of Galileo laid the foundations 
for modern physical science. The early scientists based their 
work, not upon experiment and the principle of induction, but 
upon hypothesis strangely interwoven with conclusions drawn 
from sacred writings. These supposedly scientific conclusions 
were the product of fertile imagination unguided by intelligent 
questions put to nature. “De Principii’s Rerum Naturalium” 
was the only science of its day and was taught everywhere in 
the medieval schools. It assumed to be founded on revelation 
and became hopelessly mixed with religious faith. 
