The Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society, Volume 34, 1951-1952 TABLE OF CONTENTS OFFICERS ........................................................................................................5 ​ PAPERS LAWRENCE LOWELL,PRESIDENT ...............................................................7 ​ BY JULLIAN LOWELL COOLIDGE FROM A DANA HILL WINDOW ...................................................................19 BY HELEN INGERSOLL TETLOW FOUR YEARS AT HARVARD COLLEGE: 1888-1892 .......................................37 BY CHARLES LANE HANSON MEMORIES OF NINETEENTH CENTURY CAMBRIDGE ...................................59 BY LOIS LILLEY HOWE MOUNT AUBURN"S SIXSCORE YEARS ......................................................77 BY OAKES I. AMES FREDERICK HASTINGS RINDGE ..............................................................97 BY JOHN W. WOOD CAMBRIDGE, A PIONEER HOME OF ELECTRONICS ....................................111 BY HAROLD B. RICHMOND A TRIBUTE TO SAMUEL ATKINS ELIOT .....................................................125 BY LOIS LILLEY HOWE ANNUAL REPORTS ............................................................................................127 ​ MEMBERS .........................................................................................................137 ​ THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY PROCEEDINGS FOR THE YEARS 1951-52 LIST OF OFFICERS FOR THESE TWO YEARS President: Hon. Robert Walcott Vice-Presidents: Miss Lois Lilley Howe Mr. Bremer W. Pond Mr. John W. Wood Treasurer: Mr. John T. G. Nichols Curator: Mrs. Laura Dudley Saunderson Secretary: Mr. David T. Pottinger Editor: Mr. Charles Lane Hanson (1951) Mr. John R. Walden (1952) MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL The foregoing and the following: 1951 Mr. Roger Gilman Miss Katherine F. Crothers Mrs. Mildred Hunter Brown Miss Penelope B. Noyes Miss Rosamond Coolidge 1952 Miss Penelope B. Noyes Miss Rosamond Coolidge Mr. C. Conrad Wright Miss Katherine F. Crothers Mr. Dudley Clapp 6 ​LAWRENCE LOWELL, PRESIDENT BY JULIAN LOWELL COOLIDGE Read January 30, 1951 LAWRENCE LOWELL was born December 13, 1856. He was brought up mostly in ​ Boston,​ but spent two of his early years in Europe. His liveliest recollection of that time was a small skirmish between Prussian and Nassau soldiers in the Austro-Prussian war. Winters were first spent in Boston. It was there that I had my first personal relationship with the family. At the age of five I attended a class of a few children in Mrs. Lowell's house on Beacon Street. I remember one morning Mr. Lowell's sister Amy said to me, "I had lots of fun this morning playing horse with my brother Lawrence; his suspenders made splendid reins." When Lawrence was eleven years of age the Lowells established their summer home in Brookline, and here the family was largely brought up. How lively must the table conversation have been! They were all fluent; I have often wondered who did the listening. All of his life Lawrence Lowell found it hard to listen patiently. If you went to him with any question or difficulty, he would walk about the room, his very nimble mind would see almost immediately what he believed was involved, and he would come forth with his solution, sometimes before the problem had been completely stated. Professor Whitehead once told me that soon after he came to Harvard a difficult question came up in a meeting of the members of the Department of Philosophy. It was decided that a committee should lay the matter before the President, and to his dismay, he found that he was on the committee. The meeting was arranged, the subject was announced, and the statement begun. Almost immediately Mr. Lowell interrupted the speaker, gave his definite view of the matter and his solution of the difficulty. When he had finished Whitehead said, "Excuse me, Mr. Lowell, but if you could wait while I explained what the problem really is, there would be a better chance of arriving at a satisfactory solution." Lowell seemed momentarily nonplussed, but that was the beginning of the friendship between the two. 7 Lowell's life in college was not remarkable at first. The Class of '77 was reported to be the worst behaved that had come to Cambridge in a long time. His later college years were better, and ended with some eclat. He went in for distance running, beating the college record for the half mile by the tidy margin of thirty seconds. He specialized in mathematics under the great Benjamin Peirce, writing a creditable honors thesis about quaternions, which was subsequently published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With regard to Peirce, it is curious to note that Lowell regarded him and Henry Adams as the two most inspiring teachers with whom he came in contact. On the other hand, the judgment that Peirce was almost the worst possible teacher was well nigh universal. Lowell sat in the Law School under such outstanding exponents of the law as Langdell, Ames, Thayer and Gray. Lowell spent two years at the Law School and another in a Boston office and then was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. A year later he formed a partnership with his brother-in-law Francis Cabot Lowell and Frederick Jessup Stimson. The personal intimacy that came out of this relation continued in each case till terminated by death. Loyalty to a friend or fellow worker was absolutely unshakable in Mr. Lowell. Mr. William J. Bingham, Director of Athletics, told me that when he was first appointed he went with Mr. Lowell to a great meeting to celebrate Bingham's appointment. There was much enthusiasm, for athletically-minded graduates can be very enthusiastic when they are not just the opposite. Mr. Lowell said to Bingham, "I'll stick by you now, and I'll stick by you when all who are now cheering you will be out for your scalp." I occasionally ran across the same thing myself. I recollect my embarrassment when meeting him accidentally with a man I did not know. Mr. Lowell said, "We are just alike, we are both named Lowell, we both ran the mile, and we both do mathematics." I should not have been more embarrassed if Einstein or the Pope had proclaimed me a colleague, but there was an underlying element of truth. These were things which he understood. He always had an appreciation for men whose interests or background or inheritance were familiar to him. It is not quite clear why Lowell did not make a success at the law. His biographer, Henry Yeomans, speaks at length on this subject. What is certain is that Lowell himself perceived it. Fifteen years after leaving college he had pretty much given up the idea of being a lawyer, but his 8 interest in problems of government increased mightily and his writing on government questions became more and more significant. His most important work was, of course, his Government of England. He once told me that he felt that some American should produce the counterpart of Bryce's American Commonwealth, and he did not see why he should not be the man to write it. I have no ability to compare these two works; what Lowell wrote was certainly well received in England, and was highly praised by English authorities. One can understand what a pang it was to him, many years later, when his was replaced as prescribed reading at Harvard by the very different work of Laski. One certain thing is that Lowell told how the British Government worked in actual practice. In the years while he was Professor of Government, Lowell showed what would be his guiding thoughts during his presidency. First and foremost, he was interested in Harvard College. This does not mean that he was not interested in the other great departments of Harvard University. He assumed that it was self-evident that the Law and Medical Schools were the best in their respective categories in the country. The success of the Business School filled him with a sort of awe, but he distinguished sharply between those departments which appealed to him and those which did not. He felt that Harvard had no business to support anything which was not first class. For years he never set foot inside the walls of the first Fogg Museum. He had a higher appreciation of the second Fogg. He was once surprised there practicing a high jump over a barrier. He could not see why both Harvard and Yale should each support a Department of Forestry, and allowed the School at Petersham to run on at a very slow rate. Especially did he feel there was no justification for two adjacent schools of engineering. He worked out an elaborate merger with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which Harvard seemed to get nothing except the titles of certain professorships. This was disallowed by the courts as being frankly contrary to the wishes of the testator. But there could be no doubt of his absorbing interest in Harvard College, which he believed was in process of extinction. For years there had been an ever-increasing movement towards three years as the normal period of residence for the A.B. degree. This had been strongly favored by Eliot, who was impressed by the mounting demand for more time for the preparation of candidates for the higher degrees 9 in law, medicine, or science, and believed that the only way to save the A.B. was to shorten the time required for its attainment. Mr. Lowell rather brutally said, "The best way to save the A.B. degree is to make it worth saving." Lowell felt that the College was in process of dissolution in two ways. The excessive diversity of subject matter for undergraduate study had brought about a condition where no one could point to any specific thing and say that the degree stood for that. The excessive size of college classes and diversity of interests and living conditions had gone so far that loyalty to the College as a whole was well nigh meaningless. Lowell's remedy for the first of these evils was a tightening up of the course requirement. He insisted that a well-educated man should have at least a bowing acquaintance with all of the great fields of intellectual endeavor, and that in some one field he should have a glimpse of the lines of further advance.