ship to each other. Students and a majority of the faculty accepted the more flexible curriculum with enthusiasm. On the basis of a careful statistical study, Professor Brigham concluded in 1897 that the students had not abused it by taking a large number of easy courses and that they kept their programs in balance without heavy specialization in a few departments.
Disturbed by the extent of cribbing in examinations, the students of the College persuaded the faculty in 1895 to adopt an honor system which lasted for two years. Unsatisfactory implementation for its enforcement seems to explain abandoning the experiment. It was not to be revived until nearly a decade later when campus sentiment, in line with that in other colleges, once again favored its re-adoption.
Graduate study won only slight faculty endorsement, particularly in view of the limited library and laboratory facilities and the demands of the undergraduate program. The faculty, however, was at pains to encourage able students, especially those expecting to teach, or to go into science, to take advanced courses in the large universities.
The subject matter and instruction of the science departments seemed to be increasingly attractive and relevant to students. Ernest Fox Nichols, fresh from graduate study at Cornell, followed Dr. Osborn in the Physics Department from 1892 to 1898. A very able research scholar, he was responsible for purchasing several pieces of apparatus for the department and for introducing laboratory work which he felt to be of particular value for training in “accuracy of observation, the power of close and exact reasoning, and a discrimination in judging the weight which each cause shall have in making up the main result.”
His successor, Clement D. Child, with a Ph.D. from Cornell, came to Colgate in 1898 to carryon in the Nichols pattern. Professor McGregory’s chemistry courses drew such large enrollments that he turned to promising young graduates for instructors or assistants, some of whom were to have eminent careers in the field. Among them were: Edward Ellery, ’90; John B. Ekeley, ’91; and Thomas J. Bryan, ’93.
Albert Perry Brigham, geologist and geographer, began his eminent career at Colgate as teacher and scholar in 1892 when he took over the Department of Geology and Natural History. As a boy in Perry, New York, he came under the decisive influence of “a nature-loving and nature-knowing preacher,” Walter R. Brooks, then pastor in that
