The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

[73] interested to see what he gave to students. There were twenty or more excellent notes on astronomy and optics, and only one on magnetism and one on electricity. Professor Winthrop assisted at certain astronomical events; made interesting observations on the earthquake which visited Cambridge in 1755, and which was sufficiently powerful to throw bricks from a chimney of the professor's house across the pathway. He was elected member of the Royal Society of London. Count Rumford, then Benjamin Thompson, it is said, walked from Woburn to Cambridge to hear Professor Winthrop lecture.

After Winthrop came Rev. Mr. Williams; then Professor Farrar, a remarkable lecturer. Up to the year 1830, astronomy and physics were the only sciences to which much attention was paid in Cambridge. There were no laboratories even in chemistry.

In 1816, Dr. Jacob Bigelow was appointed Rumford professor and lecturer on the application of science to the useful arts. He was perhaps the earliest citizen of Massachusetts to recognize the importance of scientific training for young men who proposed to enter into the professions which require technical knowledge of the sciences. It is to him, I believe, that the community owes the primal impulse which culminated in the establishment of technical schools in America. He was a broad-minded physician, and represented a type of which Cambridge has had remarkable examples. Daniel Treadwell succeeded him in the Rumford professorship. Professor Treadwell was an eminent inventor; to him we owe the method of building up steel guns, which revolutionized the process of manufacturing heavy ordnance, both in this country and Europe. To understand Professor Treadwell's work one should read the admirable memoir of him written by Dr. Morrill Wyman.

There had been a long period of intellectual inactivity in science from the time of Professor John Winthrop (1779) to the advent of Dr. Bigelow (1816).

Men were now awakening to the importance of a knowledge of science, and Dr. Bigelow's plans for technological education doubtless contributed greatly to this awakening. In 1842, Dr. Asa Gray, the great botanist, came to Cambridge, and his coming marks an epoch in the scientific life of our city. In 1847, Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Jeffries Wyman, and Professor Horsford