had no supply of electricity, except the common wet battery, yet we successfully carried out the ectrolitic deposition of nickel and copper. The first gas cumbustion furnace was bought after I graduated; at that time we were still using charcoal to make combustions. The first assay furnace was a crude affair built by Mr. Pettee in 1868. Gas or gasoline assay furnaces had not been heard of at that time. Bunsen published an account of filtering with the vacuum pump about 1869; C. H. Wing at once rigged up a pump and used the method. In 1867 Dr. Gibbs had the idea that nitrogen determinations could be made by the use of the Sprengel pump, and in order to test the method I rigged up a mercury pump with which I made a number of successful determinations of nitrogen. The outfit of the School even so late as 1870 was no better than that of a well-equipped high school is to-day. The entire outfit furnished each student with the exception of the balance did not exceed twenty dollars, and he had to find his own platinum. But with this limited amount of apparatus work was done that has stood the test of time. The degree of S.B. then granted meant that the student had studied some one branch of science until he was fairly proficient in it. At present it is only equivalent to the A.B., meaning only that the student has been through a general course of study.

The influence of the School on education in this country is hardly to be estimated. Its methods have revolutionized the University, and it has been said that instead of the University absorbing the School the School has absorbed the University: for now the methods that were introduced in the School are used throughout the University, and every professor employs to a greater or less extent the laboratory method, teaching his students how to use their material rather than to memorize text-books. Many think that this has been carried too far and that a student should be better grounded in the elements of education before entering into advanced studies of his own choosing. In other words there is a decided protest against the elective system as now adopted in the University. And in this view they are right; a man cannot be too well trained in his preliminary studies before he undertakes his life-work. On the other hand a too rigid adherence to a set course is not advisable; a certain latitude should be allowed in the choice of these preliminary studies. and those which will lead more directly to a man's chosen life work should receive the most attention.

As an illustration, for a student in chemistry, engineering, or bot

any, it is almost indispensable that he should have a good reading knowledge of scientific French, German, and English, and a knowledge of Latin will often be of assistance. But these languages as taught in the schools have but little value to him. In German, for instance, he may be well acquainted with literary German, but when he tries to read scientific German he will be entirely at sea. The mining engineer, especially, should understand Spanish. In our German course in the School we chose a German Chemistry, and in this we had a decided advantage of the instructor, as we understood what we were reading and he did not. We soon learned to translate this work with ease whereas, had we taken literary German, we should have been but little better off at the end of the course than at the beginning.

The great trouble in the new facilities for advanced studies will be, as President Lowell has ably said, that it will tend to build up a generation of teachers who will be well learned in all that has gone before but who will lack the initiative to go ahead and do things for themselves. The education that we received in the old School was not so much the study of what had been done, and in this way differing from the education that preceded it, as it was the power to think and reason on what we were doing and to initiate new work. Those of us who afterwards taught, taught not so much because we had been educated to teach as because we had found out something that we felt we must impart to others. Each of us imbibed something of the enthusiasm of our masters and tried to pass it on to our students.

HENRY ADAMS, '58.

BY JAMES FORD RHODES, LL.D., '01, AND HENRY CABOT LODGE, '71. [HENRY ADAMS, '58, son of Charles Francis Adams, '25, brother of John Quincy Adams, '53, Charles Francis Adams, '56, and Brooks Adams, '70, was born in Boston, February 16, 1838, and died in Washington, D.C., March 27, 1918. The estimates of his work and personality given at the April meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society by his fellow-historian, Mr. Rhodes, and his intimate friend, Senator Lodge, are here printed, with small modifications, by the permission of these gentlemen.]

MR. RHODES'S TRIBUTE.

N the death of Henry Adams our country has lost a great historian. His "monumental study of Jefferson and Madison," to use the words of Gooch in his book on historians in the nineteenth century, placed him in the front rank of historians. He gave ten or twelve years to his "History of Jefferson's and Madison's Administrations," but a

thousand copies was the extent of the sale. Not that he desired the money compensation, for of all men used to money he seemed to despise it most, but he did desire the appreciation which a large sale would signify. It was his custom to send around printed copies of his work before publication to a dozen or more friends for their criticisms and in one of his sombre moods he wrote that he had "but three serious readers - Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeagh, and John Hay." And he said somewhere that the value of an historian does not depend on an enormous sale but on the quality of the buyers: this truth is thorougly realized by his own work. Professors and advanced students of history possess it, admire it, and wonder at the author; but this knowledge did not come to Adams at once. When it was made known to him, however, some years after the publication of "Jefferson and Madison," he was gratified that his work was appreciated by the intellectual élite. This would have been increased could he have felt the real enthusiasm in the hall of the Massachusetts Historical Society at the proposal to make him an honorary member.

The first volume of "Jefferson and Madison" was published in 1889, the ninth and last in 1891. The work deserves all the praise it has received, and it cannot be superseded. If certain phases of these sixteen years are elaborated by other writers, they must go for their political and diplomatic history to Adams, whose work will be preserved by his profound knowledge and virile style. Moreover he had the gift of narration. What can be more interesting than his picture of Napoleon when negotiating the sale of Louisiana! His two brothers, Joseph and Lucien, went to the Tuileries to lodge their protest and found Napoleon in his bath, which, according to his custom, was strongly perfumed with cologne. We protest, said the brothers; the Chambers will not give their consent. I tell you now, answered Napoleon, "glaring from his bath at the two men" that "I shall do without the consent of anyone whomsoever." Then Joseph threatened to lead the opposition in the Chambers when Napoleon "burst into a peal of forced laughter." As the discussion went on both became angry and after "terrible" words from Joseph "Napoleon half started up, crying out: 'You are insolent! I ought' - then threw himself violently back in the bath with a force which sent a mass of perfumed water into Joseph's flushed face drenching him and Lucien, who had the wit to quote in a theatrical tone the words which Virgil put into the mouth of Neptune reproving the waves." Of course Napoleon put the sale through.

Adams had likewise a rare gift of characterization due to his thorough knowledge of his characters and his power of expression. "Napoleon Bonaparte," he wrote, "like Milton's Satan on his throne of state... sat unapproachable on his bad eminence; or when he moved, the dusky air felt an unusual weight. His conduct was often mysterious, and sometimes so arbitrary as to seem insane." The often-quoted remark of Talleyrand in regard to Hamilton may be applied to Adams. He divined Europe, and he also comprehended thoroughly the position of the United States which, though far away, was drawn into the conflict of the warring European powers. He drew a phase of Jefferson as remarkable as his portrait of the Frenchman who bestrode "the narrow world like a Colossus." Jefferson, he wrote, was reserved; he "never showed himself in crowds; . . . nor indeed was he seen at all except on horseback or by his friends and visitors in his own house. With manners apparently popular and informal, he led a life of his own, and allowed few persons to share it. . . . His true delight was in an intellectual life of science and art." But Adams later remarked, "The White House was filled with an atmosphere of adulation. Flattery gross as any that man could ask was poured into the President's ear." In his concluding volume he showed his comprehension of the sentiment of his own country. "In the American character," he wrote, "antipathy to war ranked first among political traits... No European nation could have conducted a war as the people of America conducted the war of 1812."

The merits which Gibbons ascribed to an historian, diligence and accuracy, Adams possessed in an eminent degree. Fully recognizing. this, a scholarly reviewer of his third and fourth volumes in the Nation of May 8, 1890, spoke of his "even-handed impartiality." To this quality many will demur; but, if Adams was a partisan, he was an honest partisan like Gibbon and Macaulay. Lounsbury in his book on "Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist," speaking of the contemporary criticism of Shakespeare's failure to observe the unities of time, place, and action, expressed the opinion that in "The Tempest,' Shakespeare "deliberately determined to show to the adherents of the classical school that he could not only write what they called a regular play better than they could themselves, but could make it conform even more closely than they generally did to their beloved unity of time." Now we may imagine Henry Adams listening to the Virginian whom his "Jefferson " did not satisfy, and to others who averred that

he could never forget that he was an Adams, and saying, Go to! I will show these good critics what impartiality and detachment are, and so he wrote the first six chapters of Volume I and the last four chapters of Volume IX, recording the ideas of a detached and impartial observer, who brought to his work neither a preconceived opinion nor a bias of any sort. The chapters tell for all time what the United States was in 1800 and at the close of the War of 1812 and equal Macaulay's celebrated Chapter "State of England in 1685.”

Before Henry Adams wrote the "Jefferson and Madison," he taught history at Harvard College for seven years. In response to the invitation he said to President Eliot, "But, Mr. President, I know nothing about medieval history." "With that courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the next generation of Americans," so Adams related, "Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, 'If you will point out to me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him.' The result showed that this insistence was wise. "I exhausted all my strength," Adams wrote, "in trying to keep one day ahead of my duties." "Often the stint ran on, till night and sleep ran short." But from the study and teaching of these seven years came "Mont St. Michel and Chartres," which Morse Stephens, of the University of California, informed me is the best thing on the Middle Ages in the English language. Normandy is "a small place," Adams wrote, "but one which like Attica or Tuscany has said a great deal to the world." He intimated that the smaller spire of Chartres is "the most perfect piece of architecture in the world"; that the windows are "the most splendid color decoration the world ever saw." "The pointed arch," he wrote, "reveled at Reims and the gothic architects reached perfection at Amiens." In short there was in France during the twelfth century an expenditure of wealth in developing a system of architecture "that would make a railway system look cheap." Now it is no wonder that "Jefferson and Madison" and "Mont St. Michel and Chartres" should have been written, but it is a wonder that both should have been written by the same man; that an author should have shown himself equally at home in the crude early life of the United States and amid the artistic creations of the Middle Ages.

"Beware," said Emerson, "when the great God lets loose a thinker on the planet." This is a fit introduction to his greatest work, "The Education of Henry Adams." In the revelations of a soul, richly endowed by nature and education, the thought at times is wonderfully profound, amazing the reader at the confidences reposed. Deep