American Colonial Colleges 255
the students. Classroom contact between teacher and scholar
is not enough to civilize the young people who flock to Amer-
ican universities.
Since the Renaissance every leading university of Europe
had acquired a university press, so Harvard must have one
too. As early as 1639, the first printing press in the English
colonies was imported, and began grinding out psalm-books,
colony laws, commencement broadsides, and almanacs. These
last were always compiled by some uPhilomathematicus,”
a young graduate student skilled at mathematics ; and on the
blank pages he and his friends printed poems and scientific
essays of their own composition. On this little hand-press in
the College precincts was printed John Eliot’s translation of
the Bible into Algonkian, the first Bible printed in the New
World, or printed anywhere in a barbarous and hitherto
unwritten tongue. No one can fairly deny that the Puritans
took their missionary duties seriously! Toward the end of
the century the commercial printers took up publication, and
there were no more American university presses until the
nineteenth century.
Although early Harvard paid due heed to the luxuries
and amenities, she did not neglect the necessities. President
Dunster’s course for the B.A. reproduced as nearly as pos-
sible the Cambridge curriculum. It was just such a combina-
tion of medieval philosophy and Renaissance humanism that
Cambridge taught in his undergraduate days. Freshmen,
whose average age at entrance was about sixteen, were re-
quired to be able to speak, read, and write Latin, and to
have begun Greek. In college they studied the Bible, six
of the Seven Arts (Music was the one omitted), the Learned
Tongues (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), and the Three Phi-
losophies (Metaphysics, Ethics, and Natural Science). They
had exactly the same methods as in the medieval universities