THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS

HARVARD COLLEGE, Feb. 29, 1880.

DEAR COUSIN SAM, - Although you have never been to college, you may be interested in knowing something of the gentlemen who teach the young ideas to shoot. I can assure you, they are remarkable in many ways, - a "gem" puzzle not to be solved at least half the time. As some body or other describes them in an old play, -

"They are the guide-posts pointing on

To lands they ne'er have seen, which they describe

As doth poll-parrot; and their heads they fill

With notions born of others."

There are professors and professors. Some are young, some old, some tall, and some thin. Then, too, there are some who stand midway between these extremes. But of all, the young professor is the most worthy of study. He is not so learned, perhaps, as his elder fellow-workers, but he generally appears more so. Indeed, in his own estimation there never was any one quite so erudite as himself. He can correct Homer's Greek, or pick a flaw in Newton's mathematics. He is, in his small way, a living dictionary, and as versatile as a trained poodle at the circus. But has he not a kind of fellow-feeling with students, - from whom he is removed by only a few years? Hardly; for that would be beneath his dignity, and he seems to have forgotten the good old days when he did not get high marks, and sometimes went to sleep in recitation. The barrier that separates him from the past is impassable. He awoke one morning and found himself a professor, and he does not remember his years of chrysalis life. Do you imagine, though, that he is always in this elevated position? Oh no! every now and then, when he goes out into the world, he has to take off his stilts, for there the doors are not made high enough to let him through. And he, even he, is sometimes made to feel the littleness of man, as, for instance, at a party, where he has to beg a Freshman, whom he has delighted in torturing, to introduce him to some young lady. It occasionally happens that the Freshman does not comply with this request, and then the young professor steals into a corner and meditates upon the frivolity of life and the ingratitude of youth. For x + y has no influence here, and strange to say, young ladies prefer to dance with partners who can talk of something besides the transit of Venus or the missing link. Then, too, they do not like to experiment on the laws of falling bodies with a bad waltzer, although he may be able to give the formulas for them with the utmost precision.

Pass on a score of years, and what has our professor become? A workman with a sledge-hammer, trying to drive his hobbies into the heads of his pupils. If he be a chemist, the world to him is one great molecule, whose properties must be found; and he is bent on showering globules of his solution on all who approach him. If he is a zoologist, he regards you as an animal, and discovers, if you have six toes, the bond of kinship between you and extinct ichthyosauri. If a linguist, he is for ever overwhelming you with dead roots, and the hidden beauties of a language three thousand years nearer Adam than your own. In a word, in whatever phase this specimen may appear, he is riding a hobby-horse. The disagreeable part of it is, that he wants every one to ride his hobby, and none other.

Pass on still twenty years, and we arrive at the age in professors' lives when they are fading away into fossils. Now they are indeed the lean and slippered pantaloons spoken of by the poet. Like the phonograph, they repeat the sayings of fifty years ago, and they further resemble that excellent machine in being unable to change their ideas. Are they dogmatic? Good gracious, no! They are the most liberal men in the world, as long as you don't try to argue with them. They like to tell the old, old stories, and expect you to laugh, and they assure you that life is vapid unless spent in mastering their subject. Most of them have written a text-book which they recommend to you as the best - ah me! There is modesty even in old men.

Did I say "old"? - it was a mistake; they are not old, - they have got beyond the boundaries of time, and like an alarm-clock they point continually to a fixed time years and years ago when their ideas were aroused. Since then they have remained stationary. They do not die, - they dry up (how hard it must be for some of them to do this!) until, like mummies, they become remarkable as specimens.

How, then, shall we define, how classify, this extraordinary body of mortals? This I leave you to decide for yourself.