[37] Job Lyman, Esq., of the class of 1804.
[38] General Sherman received the highest honorary degree of the college in 1866.
President Smith, whose character was a rare union of energy and gentleness, was preëminently a man of affairs.
The results of his untiring efforts to promote the welfare of the college, in various directions, will be more fully developed upon subsequent pages. Having performed valuable service for thirteen years, he resigned his office, on account of failing health, March 1, 1877, and died on the sixteenth of August following, his wife, Mrs. Sarah Ann (Adams) Smith, surviving him.
Rev. Samuel C. Bartlett, D.D., of the Chicago Theological Seminary, was elected the eighth president of the college. We insert entire his inaugural address, delivered at the Commencement, June, 1877:
"Certain occasions seem to prescribe their own themes of discourse, and certain themes are endowed with perpetual life. There are problems with which each coming generation and each last man grapples as freshly as the first.
"How shall the ripest growth of the ages be imparted to one young soul? Twice, at least, in a lifetime, is this great question wont to rise solemnly before each thoughtful man--when he looks forward in youthful hope, and when he looks back in parental solicitude. It is a question of many forms and multiplying answers. Shall there be a long, fundamental training, wide and general? or, shall it be closely professional? Shall it be predominantly classic, or scientific, or esthetic, or empiric? Many, or much? For accomplishment, or for accomplishing? Shall it fit for the tour of Europe, or for the journey of life? Masculine and feminine, or vaguely human? Shall it rattle with the drum-beat, bound with gymnastics, court fame by excursive "nines" not known on Helicon, and challenge British Oxford, alas? with its boat crew? Shall the American College student follow his option, or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches? or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the Concord sage,--'You send your son to the schoolmasters, and the schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the whole tone of the institution?