Honorary Degrees of 1908 Commencement

The honorary degrees conferred by the University at Commencement, with the descriptive sentences of President Eliot, were as follows:

Masters of Arts.

"Charles Homer Haskins, a student and teacher of history at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University, a productive and distinguished scholar at each one, welcome indeed to this society of scholars;

"Benjamin Johnson Lang, musician and composer, church organist at fifteen, as teacher, organist and conductor, for many years the servant and guide of the best singing societies in Boston;

Doctor of Science

"William Crawford Gorgas, son of a Confederate soldier, first lieutenant, captain, major and colonel in the Medical Corps of the United States Army, chief sanitary officer of the Isthmian Canal Zone, today the most successful demonstrator of the present efficacy and future promise of preventive medicine;

Doctors of Divinity

"William Wallace Fenn, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, a reverent and philosophic adventurer in the humane restatement of systematic theology;

"William Channing Gannett, by inheritance and nurture a humanitarian preacher and poet, whose inevitable themes are nature's miracles, the thought of God, faithfulness, and moral beauty;

Doctors of Laws

"Henry Newton Sheldon, jurist, in youth a lieutenant in the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, for twenty-eight years a legal practitioner in Boston, for fourteen years past a learned and independent Massachusetts judge, now on the Supreme bench;

"Charles Van Hise Pre-Cambrian and metamorphic geologist, professor successively of metallurgy, mineralogy and geology, president of the leading state university, the University of Wisconsin;

"Augustus Everett Willson, Kentuckian by birth and residence. Harvard Bachelor of Arts in 1869, a trusted and respected lawyer, in politics a Republican in a Democratic State, elected governor of Kentucky in 1907 for four years, after an energetic and troublous contest, a fearless, honest and disinterested public servant."