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Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, The close of the War (search)
abstracted from the Chapel and sent to Yale; the communion wine was stolen; a paper bombshell was exploded behind a curtain in the Greek recitation-room; and Professor Pierce discovered one morning that all his black-boards had been painted white. All the copies of Cooke's Chemical Physics suddenly disappeared one afternoon, and death his family received letters upon letters from persons of whom they had never heard, but who wished to express their gratitude for his generosity. Prof. Benjamin Pierce, the mathematician, was rather an awe-inspiring figure as he strolled through the college grounds, recognizing few and speaking to none — apparently oblivif something remarkable was taking place. The president had said in one of his addresses to the Freshmen that it would require a whole generation to utilize Professor Pierce's discoveries in algebra; and I believe, at last accounts, they have not been utilized yet. He would often be seen in the horse-cars making figures on scraps
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, Doctor Holmes. (search)
at a horse's hinder leg. First great angle above the hoof,-- That is the gambrel; hence gambrel roof. Now, any one who looks carefully at the picture of the old Holmes house, in Morse's biography of the Doctor, will perceive that this was not the style of roof which the house had,--at least, in its later years. Doctor Holmes graduated at Harvard in 1829 at the age of twenty. His class has been a celebrated one in Boston, and there were certainly some good men in it,--especially Benjamin Pierce and James Freeman Clarke,--but I think it was Doctor Holmes's class-poems that gave it its chief celebrity, which, after all, means that it was a good deal talked about. In one of these he said: No wonder the tutor can't sleep in his bed With two twenty-niners over his head. He was said to have composed twenty-nine poems for his class, and then declared that he had reached the proper limit,--that it would not be prudent to go beyond the magical number. It was not a dissipated
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, Elizur Wright (search)
been exposed by Elizur Wright. In 1850, when he became Commissioner, Mr. Wright sent to their agents for a statement of their financial standing, and not receiving a reply requested them to leave the State. Finding that the matter could not be evaded, they at length forwarded two reports signed by two actuaries, both Fellows of the Royal Society, which were not of a satisfactory character, so that Mr. Wright insisted on his previous order. The agents then applied for support to Prof. Benjamin Pierce, the distinguished mathematician of Harvard University, and one of the most aggressively pro-slavery men about Boston. He probably looked upon Elizur Wright as a vulgar fanatic, and supposing that a Fellow of the Royal Society must necessarily be an honorable man, came forward in support of Messrs. Neisen and Woolhouse without sufficiently investigating the question at issue; and the result was a controversy between Elizur Wright and himself in which he was finally beaten off the f