and thence deducing the will of heaven, was also very important in Greek religion. This art, however, appears not to have been, as some other modes of ascertaining the will of the gods undoubtedly were, of genuine Aryan growth. It is foreign to the Homeric poems, and must have been introduced into Greece after their composition. In like manner, as the Romans themselves believed, the art was not indigenous in Rome, but derived from Etruria.[1] The Etruscans were said to have learned it from a being named Tages, grandson of Jupiter, who had suddenly sprung from the ground near Tarquinii. Instructions were contained in certain books called libri haruspicini, fulgurales, rituales. The art was practised in Rome chiefly by Etruscans, occasionally by native-born Romans who had studied in the priestly schools of Etruria. From the regal period to the end of the republic, haruspices were summoned from Etruria to deal with prodigies not mentioned in the pontifical and Sibylline books, and the Roman priests carried out their instructions as to the offering necessary to appease the anger of the deity concerned. Though the art was of great importance under the early republic, it never became a part of the state religion. In this respect the haruspices ranked lower than the augurs, as is shown by the fact that they received a salary; the augurs were a more ancient and purely Roman institution, and were a most important element in the political organization of the city. In later times the art fell into disrepute, and the saying of Cato the Censor is well known, that he wondered how one haruspex could look another in the face without laughing (Cic. De div. ii. 24). Under the empire, however, we hear of a regular collegium of sixty haruspices; and Claudius is said to have tried to restore the art and put it under the control of the pontifices. This collegium continued to exist till the time of Alaric.
See A. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité (1879–1881); Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung, iii. (1885), pp. 410-415; G. Schmeisser, Die etruskische Disciplin vom Bundesgenossenkriege bis zum Untergang des Heidentums (1881), and Quaestionum de Etrusca disciplina particula (1872); P. Clairin, De haruspicibus apud Romanos (1880). Also Omen.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, the oldest of American educational
institutions, established at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1636
the General Court of the colony voted £400 towards “a schoale
or colledge,” which in the next year was ordered to be at “New
Towne.” In memory of the English university where many
(probably some seventy) of the leading men of the colony had
been educated, the township was named Cambridge in 1638.
In the same year John Harvard (1607–1638), a Puritan minister
lately come to America, a bachelor and master of Emmanuel
college, Cambridge, dying in Charlestown (Mass.), bequeathed
to the wilderness seminary half his estate (£780) and some three
hundred books; and the college, until then unorganized, was
named Harvard College (1639) in his honour. Its history is
unbroken from 1640, and its first commencement was held in
1642. The spirit of the founders is beautifully expressed in the
words of a contemporary letter which are carved on the college
gates: “After God had carried us safe to New-England, and wee
had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our liveli-hood,
rear’d convenient places for Gods worship, and setled the Civill
Government; One of the next things we longed for, and looked
after was to advance Learning, and perpetuate it to Posterity;
dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our
present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.” The college charter of
1650 dedicated it to “the advancement of all good literature,
arts, and sciences,” and “the education of the English and Indian
youth ... in knowledge and godlynes.” The second building
(1654) on the college grounds was called “the Indian College.”
In it was set up the College press, which since 1638 had been in the
president’s house, and here, it is believed, was printed the translation
of the Bible (1661–1663) by John Eliot into the language
of the natives, with primer, catechisms, grammars, tracts, &c.
A fair number of Indians were students, but only one, Caleb
Cheeshahteaumuck, took a bachelor’s degree (1665). By generous
aid received from abroad for this special object, the college was
greatly helped in its infancy.
The charter of 1650 has been in the main, and uninterruptedly since 1707, the fundamental source of authority in the administration of the university. It created a co-optating corporation consisting of the president, treasurer and five fellows, who formally initiate administrative measures, control the college funds, and appoint officers of instruction and government; subject, however, to confirmation by the Board of Overseers (established in 1642), which has a revisory power over all acts of the corporation. Circumstances gradually necessitated ordinary government by the resident teachers; and to-day the various faculties, elaborately organized, exercise immediate government and discipline over all the students, and individually or in the general university council consider questions of policy. The Board of Overseers was at first jointly representative of state and church. The former, as founder and patron, long regarded Harvard as a state institution, controlling or aiding it through the legislature and the overseers; but the controversies and embarrassments incident to legislative action proved prejudicial to the best interests of the college, and its organic connexion with the state was wholly severed in 1866. Financial aid and practical dependence had ceased some time earlier; indeed, from the very beginning, and with steadily increasing preponderance, Harvard has been sustained and fostered by private munificence rather than by public money. The last direct subsidy from the state determined in 1824, although state aid was afterwards given to the Agassiz museum, later united with the university. The church was naturally sponsor for the early college. The changing composition of its Board of Overseers marked its liberation first from clerical and later from political control; since 1865 the board has been chosen by the alumni (non-residents of Massachusetts being eligible since 1880), who therefore really control the university. When the state ceased to repress effectually the rife speculation characteristic of the first half of the seventeenth century, in religion as in politics, and in America as in England, the unity of Puritanism gave way to a variety of intense sectarianisms, and this, as also the incoming of Anglican churchmen, made the old faith of the college insecure. President Henry Dunster (c. 1612–1659), the first president, was censured by the magistrates and removed from office for questioning infant baptism. The conservatives, who clung to pristine and undiluted Calvinism, sought to intrench themselves in Harvard, especially in the Board of Overseers. The history of the college from about 1673 to 1725 was exceedingly troubled. Increase and Cotton Mather, forceful but bigoted, were the bulwarks of reaction and fomenters of discord. One episode in the struggle was the foundation and encouragement of Yale College by the reactionaries of New England as a truer “school of the prophets” (Cotton Mather being particularly zealous in its interests), after they had failed to secure control of the government of Harvard. It represented conservative secession. In 1792 the first layman was chosen to the corporation; in 1805 a Unitarian became professor of theology; in 1843 the board of overseers was opened to clergymen of all denominations; in 1886 attendance on prayers by the students ceased to be compulsory. Thus Harvard, in response to changing ideas and conditions, grew away from the ideas of its founders.
Harvard, her alumni, and her faculty have been very closely connected with American letters, not only in the colonial period, when the Mathers, Samuel Sewall and Thomas Prince were important names, or in the revolutionary and early national epoch with the Adamses, Fisher Ames, Joseph Dennie and Robert Treat Paine, but especially in the second third of the 19th century, when the great New England movements of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism were led by Harvard graduates. In 1805 Henry Ware (1764–1845) was elected the first anti-Trinitarian to be Hollis professor of divinity, and this marked Harvard’s close connexion with Unitarianism, in the later history of which Ware, his son Henry (1794–1843), and Andrews Norton (1786–1852), all Harvard alumni and professors,
- ↑ The statement of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ii. 22) that the haruspices were instituted by Romulus is due to his confusing them with the augurs.
