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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Three years ago I was one of those who gathered in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin. I have given them that order of precedence which they had in the minds of those our pious founders. The Hebrew came first because they believed that it had been spoken by God himself and that it would have been the common speech of mankind but for the judicial invention of the modern languages at Shinar. Greek came next because the New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough of the primeval forest, there were probably few who believed that a book written in any living language could itself live.
1. Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of Professor Sydney Willard, who, himself selftaught, had no notion of its pronunciation.
∗ Copyright 1800, by James Russell Lowell.
1. From a treatise on worms by William Ramesey, physician in ordinary to Charles II, which contains some very direct hints of the modern germ-theory of disease.