Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. HIS STUDIES. THE accurate determination of any man's college rank is usually of small importance, especially after thirty years have intervened since his graduation and his worth has long since been tested to sterner standards than those of the rank-list; but no one will deny legitimate curiosity, perhaps even, of scientific interest. Probably no one is less curious about his college marks than Mr. Roosevelt; perhaps he never knew or has quite forgotten his exact rank, but if he has not forgotten, doubtless he relishes a "certain piquant pleasure" at the visible disproportion between his college rank and his success in after life, for his rank in a class of one hundred and sixty-one was buttwenty-first, the same as Grant's at West Point, about the same as that of Emerson and of Holmes at Harvard. There is a difference, as Bacon points out, between excellence and excelling. Roosevelt went to Harvard for an education, he did not go to compete for marks. Had he done so he would have taken before graduation an examination for final honors in natural history, a special mark of distinction he could have easily won. "No man ever came to Harvard more serious in his purpose to secure first of all an education," his intimate friend, Ex- Governor Curtis Guild, Jr., says, "he was forever at it, and probably no man of his time read more extensively or deeply, especially in directions that did not count on the honor-list or marking-sheet. He had the happy power of abstraction, and nothing was more common than a noisy roomful of college mates with Roosevelt frowning with intense absorption over a book in the corner. He did not read for examinations but for information." Of academic distinctions he won but few. He did not win a prize for reading, nor for English compos...