business of putting out fires will be left to those who are paid to do it. The great point is, after all, to secure for the service men who will use such apparatus, and distribute it in such a manner, as will produce the best results.

During the last two years a great many ingenious contrivances have been introduced for the speedy extinguishment of fires; but it would exceed the limits of this article to attempt any description of them. In order to stimulate invention in the proper direction, the National Board of Underwriters should organize a standing commission, composed of competent engineers, to test the various kinds of apparatus in use or proposed, and report from time to time upon their efficiency. The commission would also be able to perform a great public service by establishing general rules for the management of fire departments, the preparation of statistics of fires, and a standard for hose and hydrant couplings.

JAMES M. BUGBEE.

ART. V. Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By JOHN LANGDON SIBLEY, M. A., Librarian of Harvard University, and Member of the Massachusetts and other Historical Societies. Vol. I. 1642-1658. With an Appendix, containing an Abstract of the Steward's Accounts, and Notices of Non-Graduates, from 1649-50 to 1659. Cambridge: Charles William Sever, University Bookstore. 1873.

AT the right time, and eminently from the pen of the most, if we might not say the only, competent person for the accomplishing of it, Harvard College, as she graduates her two hundred and thirty-second class of alumni, receives from her diligent Librarian this labor of his love. Up to this year the number of her graduates, classified on the Triennial Catalogue, was 11,553. Of these, almost half, as the solemn and suggestive note reads, E vivis cesserunt stelligeri. Of ninetyeight of these who have been the longest among the stars, and who were the first to receive the rude yet tender nursing

of the wilderness College, and to lead off, with honor and love, the line that is to follow them, we have here the memorials in adequate biographical sketches. So much time has spared to us. So much a diligence and a devotion for which there is no reward but in the love which prompted them have gathered. 'and gleaned for us from the search through more than a third of a century into all the nooks and hiding-places of history.

Mr. Sibley has special and eminent qualifications for the task which he has here undertaken. Though the College numbers among its alumni many who take a fond pride in its history, and would gladly search out every historic fact relating to it, and though the taste and skill for such investigations characterize a fair proportion of our studious men, it may be fairly affirmed that no ten persons among us, combining their labors and resources, could have so faithfully or successfully accomplished the work which he has performed. Pecuniary compensation is of course out of the question. This is one of those labors in which the pleasure of congenial toil must offset the outlay of time and all the incidental expenses incurred by journeys, correspondence, the collection of materials, and the remuneration of helpers. More than a score of years ago Mr. Sibley gave proof that he possessed all the best qualities of an intelligent, accomplished, and painstaking investigator, in his "History of the Town of Union, Maine," the place of his birth. This is a model work of its kind, for authenticity, distribution of subjects, exhaustiveness of details, and vivacity and perspicuity of style. Having been appointed Assistant Librarian at Harvard in 1841, and Librarian in 1856, he has ever since been accumulating materials and maturing a wise and apt method for his present work. He has had at hand a large part of the books and papers containing the information he has needed, and he has had the training and practice which have taught him where to look for what he desired from outside sources. He for the first time edited the Triennial Catalogue in 1842, ́as it had never been edited before; and ten times since the successive issues of that ever-interesting and expanding publication, so eagerly sought for by the graduates, have shown more and more of the fruits of his diligence. Obituary dates were for the first time attached by him to the names in the Trien

nial in 1845. When the late Professor Sidney Willard, in 1855, was preparing for the press his "Memories of Youth and Manhood," Mr. Sibley, in answer to his request, addressed to him a letter, printed in the Appendix to that work, giving full particulars about the measures adopted by himself for collecting and preserving materials for biographies of the graduates of the University. The system thus instituted has been very effective for recent years. But the ascertaining of the true dates to be affixed to the star-bearing names of the deceased graduates for nearly the whole of the first two centuries of the College has been a task which very few persons would have cared to assume. Mr. Sibley wrote, in 1855, that for that purpose he had then examined "with great care several thousand volumes, and probably more than twenty thousand pamphlets."

The coming to the light of a Treasurer's old College accountbook and the discovery in an office in London of an early and unique catalogue of graduates were occasions which prompted and furnished Mr. Sibley with material to communicate to the Massachusetts Historical Society, for its Proceedings in 1862 and 1864, two very valuable papers of curious information. And while he has been faithfully fulfilling his official duties as Librarian in the College, gathering from all sources, largely by personal application, treasures new and old for shelf and cabinet, and continuing and perfecting the improved system of cataloguing by cards, he has given his few spare hours, principally of the night, and in his own home, to the unwearied exacting toil of preparing these biographical sketches.

The laborious but congenial task to which Librarian Sibley has devoted himself can hardly fail to suggest to his more appreciative readers the name of old Anthony a Wood and his Athena Oxonienses. Nor is this by any means a comparison of small with great things. On the contrary, both for the general subject and for the details which enter into its treatment, we should be disposed to claim for our Cambridge historiographer an equal merit and dignity in his theme, and a relatively equal importance in the men and their accomplishments set forth in his pages. Strip the scholars, prelates, and placemen commemorated in the Oxford folios of all their adventitious and impersonal consequence derived from their con

nection with the social and ecclesiastical privileges accruing to them, and they themselves will stand forth as no more than the peers of many of our Cambridge graduates. And as to the works, the life labors in literature, which Wood with such elaborate minuteness has set down after the names of those who can be called authors, it would appear from his pages that very many of these were still in manuscript when he mentioned them, and have never yet emerged from that condition, even if still extant. And how few among all that attained to the honor of print have a living interest, or are worth the paper used to put them into books! As we have recently turned over the pages of those two folios, amplified by Bliss into four quartos, we have had a new reminder of De Quincey's ingenious speculations and estimates about the number of all the mountain heaps of books which are worth reading, of the proportion of them that any one would be likely to read, and how many among them all one would be the wiser or better for reading. Wood, covering a period of less than two centuries, gives us the names and the titles of the works or writings of nearly one thousand Oxford alumni. He tells us of his own natural proclivities, taste, and aptness, even from his boyhood, for the dry and almost mechanical task to which he devoted a long life. Unmarried, with no fondness for women or children, no inclination for social pleasures, he made himself a recluse, and, in fact, a literary hermit. He lived very frugally, depending on his own moderate patrimony. His intercourse with his fellowmen was mostly by correspondence for obtaining information, though he allowed himself occasionally to share the hospitality of a few tolerant persons who were in possession of documents which he wished to examine. He occupied a den in a towergarret of Merton College, with the materials of his toil heaped around him, which no profane hand was allowed to touch for the sake of dusting or arranging them. He would shuffle out in a seedy array to take his exercise when the highways and lanes were deserted, and drop into an alehouse or a victuallingshop to satisfy his appetite, which was neither craving nor fastidious. He would go to any distance to hunt out from memorial windows, from sepulchral stones or brasses, and from parish registers anything which his mousing diligence could

turn to service for his Athena or his Fasti. His Antiquitates were first published in 1674; his Athena, in 1691. He himself records, under date of 1694, that, at a festival in Trinity College, the Senior Proctor, Altham, spoke "dishonorably of the historiographer of Oxford, by calling him scurra and calumniator; one that in his late book he published, spoke of the vices and omitted the virtues of men; that he had Lynceus his eyes, prying and peeping as a spy. This was to please his dean, Dr. Aldrich, then vice-chancellor, who sat just behind him, and who beforehand had taken part with the Earl of Clarendon." The reference in the last line is to the prosecution of Wood by the Earl Henry Hyde, for the charge of bribery in the Athence against his father, Edward, the Lord Chancellor Clarendon. The poor antiquarian was for this banished for a season from the University, and mulcted in a fine of £40,- the amount being appropriated to the purchase of three statues for niches to the Physic Garden.

The sharp and bitter sentence which the aforesaid Senior Proctor pronounced against Wood may be taken as significant and characteristic of the general judgment expressed concerning him by many who have been indebted to his labors. But it is manifestly unjust. Wood has received but scant returns of appreciation for his priceless toil and his immense diligence of research. He was, indeed, somewhat morose and querulous, as all such musty delvers in things the greater part of which might better be forgotten are apt to be. He affected a quaint and piquant plainness, and sometimes severity, in tone. He lived through distracted times, when his conservatism in matters of Church and State caused him much wretchedness. He was horrified and disgusted by the inquisitorial and revolutionary dealing with the Universities. He hated the non-conformists. He was accused of being secretly a papist; which, however, he was not, for he lived and died in communion with the English Church, partook of its last sacrament, and avowed his love of it in his will. But he sprinkled his pages liberally with the spice and pepper of his dislikes and prejudices towards individuals, and he knew how to use his sting to avenge an indignity or an insult to himself. When towards his last days the old man was crawling out suffering under the torments of - NO. 240.

VOL. CXVII.

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