This in itself was a great good fortune; even greater was the fact that his new life brought him into immediate contact with a scholar of great genius and lovableness.
Someone has said that America has produced four scholars of the very first rank--Agassiz in natural science, Whitney in philology, Willard Gibbs in physics, and Gildersleeve in Greek.

It was the last of these who now took Walter Page in charge.

The atmosphere of Johns Hopkins was quite different from anything which the young man had previously known.
The university gave a great shock to that part of the American community with which Page had spent his life by beginning its first session in October, 1876, without an opening prayer.

Instead Thomas H.Huxley was invited from England to deliver a scientific address--an address which now has an honoured place in his collected works.

The absence of prayer and the presence of so audacious a Darwinian as Huxley caused a tremendous excitement in the public prints, the religious press, and the evangelical pulpit.