Excerpt from Herbert B. Adams: Tributes of Friends; With a Bibliography of the Department of History, Politics and Economics of the Johns Hopkins University, 1876-1901

Adams said of his own life at Amherst: My editorial connection with the Amherst Student really gave a per manent bent to my life. I learned more real useful knowl edge in that voluntary connection than in all other college means of training, in punctuation, composition, and rhet oric. To this day I can discern more lasting influences proceeding from that editorial den of mine at Amherst than from any other one college source. I have forgotten my mathematics, which I always hated, but in which I always ranked high by reason of my Exeter training, but I shall never forget how to revise other people's manuscript and read proof, although I hate that His private reading in college was chiefly in connection with the subjects upon which he had to write or debate. His tory was not a large part of his collegiate training and we might be a little surprised that he afterwards devoted his life to it. Of this he says himself: Of history, we had nothing at all, after the freshman year when Smith's Man nals of Greece and Rome were studied in well-chosen selections. The impulse came later. I remember in the philosophical course by the President Of the College one remarkable le'cture on the Philosophy of History. After rapidly reviewing the course of civilization, Dr. Seelye said that history was the grandest study in the world. That sentence decided my fate. I determined to devote myself to that grand subject. Up to that time I had no career in mind except journalism. I had written more or less for the Amherst Record and for the New York and Boston papers when I found a chance to do any reporting. But now my mind was quickly made up to pursue the 'grandest study in the world, ' the recorded experience of mankind.

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