256 History of Universities
—lectures read out of books, quizzes on the lectures, English
orations, and Latin declamations to practise their Rhetoric;
Latin disputations to practise their Logic and Philosophy.
There was less emphasis on classical belles-lettres than at
Cambridge, to be sure; but among the authors that the Har-
vard students studied in the seventeenth century were Cicero,
Sallust, Horace, Terence, and Ovid, in Latin; and in Greek,
Isocrates1Homer1Hesiod1Theocritus and the minor pastoral
poets, Theognis of Megara, Simonides of Ceos, Soph-
ocles and extracts from other dramatists; together with
the Greek Testament and the Christian Greek authors
Nonnus, Phocylides, and Duport. In Hebrew they did not
get beyond the Old Testament, and the New Testament in
Syriac. In Mathematics early Harvard was defective, as
Oxford and Cambridge were at the time; but some of the
students at least learned enough to do plane surveying, a
practical need in a new country, to study navigation, and to
make the calculations for the New England farmers’ al-
manacs.
Science until about 165S or 1660 was wholly medieval and
Aristotelian; after that Bacon, Descartes, and Copernican
Astronomy began to seep in. By 1672 the College had a
telescope, with which Thomas Brattle1 a young graduate,
made observations of the Comet of 1680 that were used by
Sir Isaac Newton in his great Principia; and in the eighteenth
century the scientific lectures of Professor John Winthrop,
F.R.S., gave such men as Count Rumford a start on their
scientific careers. Undergraduates studied catechetical divin-
ity in a Puritan manual by William Ames; but the profes-
sional study of Theology for a minister’s career began only
after taking the B.A. degree. The graduate student re-
mained in residence, studying Theology with the President,
and tutoring the undergraduates as a college fellow, to earn