Yet Harvard had then been sending forth
her graduates for more than a century. William and Mary was
founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, King's (now
Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania in 1755, and
Brown in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly in the hands
of clergymen. They tended to reproduce a type of scholarship
based upon the ancient languages. The curriculum varied but
little in the different colonies, and this fact helped to produce
a feeling of fellowship among all members of the republic of
letters. The men who debated the Stamp Act were, with a few
striking exceptions, men trained in Latin and Greek, familiar
with the great outlines of human history, accustomed to the
discipline of academic disputation. They knew the ideas and the
vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no
provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences,
likewise, the colonials were but little behind the mother
country. The Royal Society had its distinguished members here.
The Mathers, the Dudleys, John Winthrop of Connecticut, John
Bartram, James Logan, James Godfrey, Cadwallader Colden, and
above all, Franklin himself, were winning the respect of European
students, and were teaching Americans to use their eyes and their
minds not merely upon the records of the past but in searching
out the inexhaustible meanings of the present.
Pages:
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89