The progress of science
Subtitle: a poem delivered at Harvard College before a committee of Overseers, April 21, 1780
By: by a junior sophister
Series: Collections of the Harvard University Archives; Harvard in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; Early American imprints -- no. 16759
Publisher: [s.n.]
Published: 1780
Place of publication: Boston?
Language: eng
Number of pages: 10
Subjects: Poetry; Science; Intellectual life; History; Sources; Study and teaching (Higher); Harvard College (1636-1780)
Description: The 10-page pamphlet contains a poem written by Harvard student Samuel Dexter during his junior year and presented to the Harvard Board of Overseers on April 21, 1780. The rhyming piece champions science as the "real greatness of the human race" over military power, and provides a chronological panegyric of literary and scientific achievements through human history in Africa, Greece, Rome, Britain, and ending with "this far western world," specifically, "infant Harvard." The poem mentions Homer, Virgil, Tully, Roger Bacon, Newton, Francis Bacon, Pope, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and finally Benjamin Franklin and Harvard Professor John Winthrop. The poem notes Winthrop's death less than a year earlier, and concludes that Harvard should promote science until the Last Judgment Day when "Then shall a Hollis, then a Hancock rise, / And spring with rapture to their native skies."
Notes: Attributed to Samuel Dexter in the Dictionary of American biography.

Signatures: [A]⁶(-[A]6).

Evans 16759

Samuel Dexter (1761-1816) was a nationally known lawyer and politician. He was born in Boston in 1761 and earned his AB from Harvard in 1780 and received an AM in 1783. He practiced law and served in both the United States House of Representatives and Senate. He was Secretary of War in 1800 and interim Secretary of the Treasury from 1800 until 1802 after which he returned to the practice of law. He also served as the first president of the Massachusetts State Temperance Society.