It was characteristic of Sumner that he must not only know the truth, but pass it on; and, after some conflict with the entrenched conservatism of the day, he finally set before Yale College men the first course in sociology ever presented in an American college curriculum.[1] He was moving, as was his wont, steadily and safely from the special to the general. His interest in the general science steadily increased, his second inspiration dating from the reading, in the late eighties, of Julius Lippert's Kulturgeschichte. His breakdown in health precipitated the change which had been preparing; and, upon his partial recovery, he ceased to teach political economy to undergraduates and developed his classic course in what the students came to call "Sumnerology." In those days a Yale man was hardly supposed to have won a genuine B.A. if he had not had "Billy Sumner." Within a few years the graduate courses also in political economy had been superseded by others in the science of society, and Professor Sumner had ceased altogether to teach the specialty of his young manhood. Many, I say, have regretted this change, but it was inevitable; the only legitimate regret is that he did not live to reap in full from the sowing of a lifetime — he himself wished that he had been able to surrender political economy sooner. For his interests had outgrown the sub-science and reached out toward the more comprehensive study of the life of society in all its phases. The idea that Sumner's career was over, when, in the early nineties, he retired from political economy, has always been a source of irritation to the men who worked with him in his latter years. As a matter of fact, some of us had been taken to his study and had viewed with amazement the serried rows of classified notes on anthropology and the science of society, and we knew what not many outsiders did, that the old-time
- ↑ "I formed a class," he says, "to read Spencer's book in the parts as they came out, and believe that I began to interest men in this important department of study, and to prepare them to follow its development, years before any such attempt was made at any other university in the world." Sketch, p. 266.
