in to the President a written declamation
subscribed by himself."--_Laws 1734, in Peirce's Hist. Harv.
Univ._, App., p. 129.

2. At the University of Cambridge, Eng., an essay upon a given
subject, written in view of a prize, and publicly recited in the
chapel of the college to which the writer belongs.

DECLAMATION BOARDS. At Bowdoin College, small establishments in
the rear of each building, for urinary purposes.

DEDUCTION. In some of the American colleges, one of the minor
punishments for non-conformity with laws and regulations is
deducting from the marks which a student receives for recitations
and other exercises, and by which his standing in the class is
determined.

Soften down the intense feeling with which he relates heroic
Rapid's _deductions_.--_Harv. Mag._, Vol. I. p. 267.

2. At the University of Cambridge, Eng., an original proposition
in geometry.

"How much Euclid did you do? Fifteen?"

"No, fourteen; one of them was a _deduction_."--_Bristed's Five
Years in an Eng. Univ._, Ed. 2d, p. 75.

With a mathematical tutor, the hour of tuition is a sort of
familiar examination, working out examples, _deductions_,
&c.--_Ibid._, pp. 18, 19.

DEGRADATION. In the older American colleges, it was formerly
customary to arrange the members of each class in an order
determined by the rank of the parent. "Degradation consisted in
placing a student on the list, in consequence of some offence,
below the level to which his father's condition would assign him;
and thus declared that he had disgraced his family."

In the Immediate Government Book, No. IV., of Harvard College,
date July 20th, 1776, is the following entry: "Voted, that
Trumbal, a Middle Bachelor, who was degraded to the bottom of his
class for his misdemeanors when an undergraduate, having presented
an humble confession of his faults, with a petition to be restored
to his place in the class in the Catalogue now printing, be
restored agreeable to his request." The Triennial Catalogue for
that year was the first in which the names of the students
appeared in an alphabetical order. The class of 1773 was the first
in which the change was made.

"The punishment of degradation," says President Woolsey, in his
Historical Discourse before the Graduates of Yale College, "laid
aside not very long before the beginning of the Revolutionary war,
was still more characteristic of the times. It was a method of
acting upon the aristocratic feelings of f