Wm to H'ry, April 6, 1873. Age: 31

W^m makes a brave decision in response to an offer from the president of Harvard, given the fact that he would not embark on Principles of Psychology for another six years, and that it would take him twelve years to complete it:

"Eliot offered me the other day the whole department (i.e. this physiology and...anatomy) for next year.  But I told him I had resolved to fight it out on the line of mental science, & with such arrears of lost time behind me & such curtailed powers of work now, could not afford to make such an expedition into anatomy."

Charles Eliot, credited with turning
Harvard into what we now think of
as Harvard, had been selected as
the school's president
in 1869.