Sophomores and juniors studying the science of reasoning learned their syllogisms from Whately’s Logic, and if they were in the class from 1836 to 1838, they had Levi Hedge’s as well. Lord Henry H. Kames’s Elements of Criticism gave juniors a basis for forming standards of taste in aesthetics, ethics, psychology, and literature. From 1835 to 1846 seniors devoted a term to Bishop Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed and from 1836 to 1846, a term to Wayland’s Elements of Moral Philosophy. Seniors also used William Paley’s Natural Theology from 1836 to 1838. These texts were then standard in American colleges.
Professor Eaton’s declaration in his Inaugural Address in 1834 when he succeeded Professor Bacon in the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy, that science and literature, properly interpreted, were useful adjuncts to religion, reveals the faculty’s approach to the study of those subjects in the ’30’s and ’40’s. From them, Eaton maintained, the ministers-to-be could draw arguments for refuting infidels and timely sermon illustrations which would make a strong impression on the popular mind then beginning to turn from the classics to science. The curriculum stressed mathematics the first two years when freshmen and sophomores took from four to six terms of algebra with occasional forays into solid and spherical geometry, calculus, trigonometry, and “mensuration.” Many of their texts were by Charles Davies and included his edition from the French of Adrien M. Legendre’s Geometry.
Work in natural philosophy, the progenitor of modern physics, was emphasized particularly for juniors. They studied mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, electricity, magnetism, and optics from Tiberio Cavallo’s Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy and, after 1835, from Denison Olmsted’s books. Professor Eaton and Professor Taylor supplemented textbook recitations by classroom experiments on a “philosophical apparatus” borrowed in 1835 from the defunct academy of John B. Yates at Chittenango, New York. For many years the officers of the Education Society had tried to raise money to buy such equipment, but it was not until after an energetic and successful fund-raising campaign by Professor Taylor himself that they purchased one for about $1,500 in 1841. The new apparatus, including a telescope, and the instructor’s enthusiasm made the subject “one of lively interest to the students.” Dr. William Mather, the physician of
