“very rapid and elementary” course delivered to the juniors by Professor Webster, who had succeeded Professor Dexter in that department of the Medical School. The elementary character of the work certainly produced great rapidity on some occasions. For the following vignette of collegiate chemical instruction in that era I am indebted to President Eliot:
My cousin Samuel Eliot, Harvard A.B. 1889, used to tell a vivid story of the manner in which his class left Holden Chapel lecture-room when Dr. John W. Webster touched off something he called a volcano in an iron pot, placed on a table in front of the class, by means of a long pole on the end of which was a small torch. He himself retired behind the closet door to perform the lighting of the volcano. The iron pot exploded into many pieces. One piece passed close to Eliot’s arm into the solid back of the wooden bench on which course delivered to the he sat. A mass of disagreeable smoke filled the building; and the class threw themselves out of the windows.
Thus, for nearly a generation, Holden’s despised lecture-rooms served only for the dirty work of the curriculum. In 1850, however, the general march of improvements reached its drowsy corner of the Yard, and a fresh series of alterations was valiantly undertaken. The west porch and the east staircase well were both removed, and the stairs placed inside the main building. (It may have been at this time that the pilasters on the eastern wall lost both their caps and their bases.) The west door received a semicircular heading to match the windows.[1] The upper floor was all thrown into the
- ↑ Shown in Miss Quincy’s drawing, in her father’s History of the University, ii, 33.
