Jacob Bigelow (1786-1879).

http://library.lehigh.edu/omeka/files/original/a5ba891d17f3c16b65e629195094f4dd.jpg

An Address on the Limits of Education, Read before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 16, 1865. Boston: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1865.

Bigelow, a physician and botanist, signed this copy of his lecture presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during its inaugural year of instruction. The years immediately following the Civil War saw the establishment of a number of institutions of higher education in America, many of which promoted practical education. In his commentary, Bigelow observes that classical studies, languages, and literatures are equally as important as technological studies: "And yet, although the practical arts, in the hands of science, have taken the lead in the great visible changes of the present century, it would be presumptive to call technology the only field from the cultivation of which mankind have obtained abundant and unlooked for harvests."