who most influenced its thought. The bit of practical teaching he
afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in
Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged
his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to his
imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the
Glacial Period and Paleontology, which had more influence on his
curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether.
The entire work of the four years could have been easily put into
the work of any four months in after life.

Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have
value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of
childhood, not by putting interests in its place, but by mental
habits which had no bias at all. It would also have weakened the
literary bias, if Adams had been capable of finding other
amusement, but the climate kept him steady to desultory and
useless reading, till he had run through libraries of volumes
which he forgot even to their title-pages. Rather by instinct
than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors or
tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating
approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he
made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his
teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him
on the rank-list, among the first third of his class. Instructors
generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars'
powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion that his instructors
were very nearly right, and when he became a professor in his
turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking his scholars, he
still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was not far
wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative standard