hon. Michigan '81) became Professor of Modern Languages in 1870, and under his direction the program of readings in German seems to have varied from year to year in the more advanced work. For example, in 1871 the senior students in the scientific course read Schiller's Wilhelm Tell and the Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges.
The number of students was somewhat increased through the addition of civil engineering students in the fall of 1872 and students of mining engineering in February, 1874, but there was no addition to the amount of the language offered. The younger men in the department usually remained but a year or two and seem to have been compelled to divide their time between German and French. That the conception of the relative difficulty of texts was somewhat different from that of the present day is shown by the fact that in 1874 students in the classical course read Goethe's Faust in their second semester, while Wilhelm Tell was considered a logical text for the fourth. It must be borne in mind that the preparation of students was very different from that in our own day; in the forties all aspirants to the bachelor's degree had a thorough training in formal grammar and long practice in Latin and Greek.
Although the Calendar of 1874-75 was the first to contain a reference to the degree of doctor of philosophy, no graduate courses were available to students in German. The age of specialization had not yet arrived; anyone with linguistic training was eligible to teach several languages. Alfred Hennequin and Paul R. B. de Pont (see also Part II: Office of the Registrar ; Part IV: Department of Romance Languages ) appeared for years in the Calendar as teachers of both French and German, and Edward Lorraine Walter ('68, Ph.D. Leipzig '77), of the Department of Latin, not only taught modern languages as well as Latin, but subsequently became head of the Department of Modern Languages.
The advanced work (that is, the third and fourth semesters of study) in German consisted at that time of Goethe's Iphigenie and Dichtung und Wahrheit, O. Brosius' Schiller und sein Verhältniss zu dem Publikum seiner Zeit, Niebuhr's Tales of Greek Heroes (for translation into German), and lectures.
Calvin Thomas ('74, A.M. '77, LL.D. '04) became Instructor in Modern Languages in 1878-79. At that time the first-semester courses consisted of beginning German (four hours) and Emilia Galotti (five hours); and German plays, Goethe's Faust, and Geschichte der deutschen Literatur were studied in the second semester. There was no required work in modern languages for the degree of bachelor of arts, but for that of bachelor of science and for the bachelor's degrees in engineering (civil engineer and mechanical engineer), two semesters each of French and German were required, and for the bachelor of letters, four semesters each of French and German.
Edwin L. Walter, 1879-87. — Morris was succeeded in 1879 by Walter as Professor of Modern Languages.
A two-hour lecture course on the science of language by Thomas was included in the program, and two years later a further addition to the courses was offered — Herder's Geschichte der Menschheit.
The amount of work in German was gradually increasing, eighteen hours being offered in the first semester of the year 1883-84 and fifteen in the second.
Calvin Thomas, 1887-95. — The work in French and German was divided in 1887-88; Walter was made Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Thomas became Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. The first notice in the Calendar of a seminar course
