I remember all these, though, if they were alive, I do not think
that any of them would remember me. The indescribable exhilaration,
which must be familiar to many of you, of leaving school and entering
college, is in great part the exhilaration of making acquaintance with
teachers who care much about their subject and little or nothing about
their pupils. To escape from the eternal personal judgements which make
a school a place of torment is to walk upon air. The schoolmaster looks
at you; the college professor looks the way you are looking. The
statements made by Euclid, that thoughtful Greek, are no longer
encumbered at college with all those preposterous and irrelevant moral
considerations which desolate the atmosphere of a school. The question
now is not whether you have perfectly acquainted yourself with what
Euclid said, but whether what he said is true. In my earliest days at
college I heard a complete exposition of the first six books of Euclid,
given in four lectures, with masterly ease and freedom, by Professor
Henrici, who did not hesitate to employ methods of demonstration which,
though they are perfectly legitimate and convincing, were rejected by
the daintiness of the Greek.
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