Hopkins, Mark
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Mark (1802-1887), a well known president of Williams College, Massachusetts. He was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, February 4, 1802, and died at Williamstown, June 17, 1887. He was graduated at Williams, and filled various positions in that institution until called to the presidency in 1836, a position which he held until 1872. He took a deep interest in foreign missions and wrote a number of ethical works, the most noted of which is perhaps his Lectures on Moral Science. He is the college professor to whom President Garfield, in addressing the Department of Superintendence at Washington, December 11, 1877, referred: It has long been my opinion that we are all educated, whether children, men, or women, far more by personal influence than by books and the apparatus of schools. If I could be taken back into boyhood today, and had all the libraries and apparatus of a university, with ordinary routine professors, offered me on the one hand, and on the other a great, luminous, rich-souled man, such as Dr. Hopkins was twenty years ago, in a tent in the woods alone, I should say give me Dr. Hopkins for my college course rather than any university with only routine professors. The privilege of sitting down before a great, clear headed, large hearted man, and breathing the atmosphere of his life, and being drawn up to him and lifted up by him, and learning his methods of thinking and living, is in itself an enormous educating power. The words given are from the official records kept by Secretary Irwin Shepard. They have given rise, no doubt, to the expression now proverbial. "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." Hop o' My Thumb, the hero of an old fairy tale which came into the English from the French Perrault. It recounts the adventures of a dwarf, Hop o' My Thumb, with a giant. It is supposed that the story had its origin in part in the Greek legend of Ulysses in the cave of the Cyclops, and in part in the legend of Theseus and Ariadne. Hop o' My Thumb is an entirely distinct character from Tom Thumb , although the two have been confounded frequently.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The facts Aiton's set down in 1910 are still the facts: Hopkins led Williams College from 1836 to 1872 and died at Williamstown in 1887. What has shifted is the balance of his reputation. His ethical writing, including the Lectures on Moral Science that Aiton's called his most noted book, is now read almost only by historians of American college philosophy, while the log saying has swallowed the man whole — Williams itself has long embraced the log as an emblem of teaching, and Hopkins survives in general memory chiefly as one end of it. Aiton's care in tracing the actual 1877 words back to Secretary Irwin Shepard's official record is worth noting, since the neat proverbial version was never a direct quotation.
Written for this edition, 2026.