navigation. He accepted the position with definite ideas of reform; but
he lacked skill in the adaptation of means to ends. He was determined to
show no favoritism to wealth and social position, and he went perhaps too
far in the opposite direction. One day when the workmen were digging the
cellar of Gray's Hall, President Hill threw off his coat, seized a
shovel, and used it vigorously for half an hour or more. This was
intended as an example to teach the students the dignity of labor; but
they did not understand it so. At the faculty meetings he carried
informality of manner to an excess. He depended too much on personal
influence, which, as George Washington said formerly, "cannot become
government." He wrote letters to the Sophomores exhorting them not to
haze the Freshmen, and, as a consequence, the Freshmen were hazed more
severely than ever. Then he suspended the Sophomores in a wholesale
manner, many of them for slight offences. However, he stopped the foot-
ball fights, and made the examinations much more strict than they had
been previously. He endeavored to inculcate the true spirit of
scholarship among the students,--not to study for rank but from a genuine
love of the subject. The opposition that his reforms excited made him
unpopular, and Freshmen came to college so prejudiced against him that
all his kindness and good will were wasted upon them.

"There goes the greatest man in this country," said a fashionable Boston
youth, one day in the spring of 1866. It was Louis Agassiz returning from
a call on President Hill. Such a statement shows that the speaker
belonged to a class of people called Tories, in 1776, and who might
properly be called so still. As a matter of fact, Agassiz had long since
passed the meridian of his reputation, and his sun was now not far from
setting. He had returned from his expedition to South America with a
valuable collection of fishes and other scientific materials; but his
theory of glaciers; which he went there to substantiate, had not been