.) "He has wead Cicewo through every year for nearly
fifty years for the sake of settling some important questions.
He has discovered that while necesse est may be used indifferently
either with the accusative and infinitive, or with ut with
the subjunctive, necesse ewat can only be used before ut with
the subjunctive. I should think it well worth living for
to have made that discovery."

I suppose we all thought when we graduated that Dr. Beck
was a man of harsh and cold nature. But I got acquainted
with him later in life and found him one of the most genial
and kind-hearted of men. He was a member of the Legislature.
He was a Free Soiler and an Abolitionist, liberally contributing
to the Sanitary Commission, and to all agencies for the benefit
of the soldiers and the successful prosecution of the war.

He came vigorously to the support of Horace Mann in his famous
controversy with Mr. Webster. Mann had vigorously attacked
Webster, and Webster in return had spoken of Mann as one of
that class of persons known among the Romans as Captatores
Verborum, which he supposed to mean one of those nice persons
who catch up other person's words for the sake of small criticism
and fault-finding. Mr. Mann replied that Webster was wrong
in his Latin, and the words Captatores Verborum meant toad-
eaters, or men who hang on the words of great men to praise
and flatter them, of which he found some conspicuous modern
examples among Webster's supporters. Professor Felton, the
Greek professor, who was a staunch friend of Webster, attacked
Mann and charged him with ignorance of Latin. But Dr. Beck
came to the rescue, and his authority as a Latin scholar
was generally conceded to outweigh that of Webster and Felton
put together.

One of the most brilliant men among the Faculty was Professor
Benjamin Peirce. Undoubtedly he was the foremost American
mathematician of his time. He dwelt without a companion in
the lofty domain of the higher mathematics.

A privacy of glorious light is thine.

He was afterward the head of the Coast Survey. He had little
respect for pupils who had not a genius for mathematics,
and paid little attention to them. He got out an edition
of Peirce's Algebra while I was in college. He distributed
the sheets among the students and would accept, instead of
a successful recitation, the discovery of a misprint on its
pages. The boys generally sadly neglected his department,
which was made elective,