William Seymour Tyler was professor of Latin, Greek, and Greek literature at Amherst College from 1832 to 1893. Amherst College was still a small school then, where the faculty knew one another very well. As the school's official historian for many decades, Tyler wrote this account of the first fifty years of the college's existence. In this excerpt, he tells the history of Edward Hitchcock’s presidency and describes his many accomplishments, the most significant being that he saved the college from financial ruin.