[10] Albert Hopkins was born in Stockbridge, Mass., July 14,1807.  He was graduated at Williams College in the class of 1826, and three years later became Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the same institution.  Astronomy was afterward added to his chair.  In 1834 he went abroad.  In the summer of 1835 he organised and conducted a Natural History expedition to Nova Scotia, the first expedition of the kind in this country.  Two years later he built at his own expense, and in part by the labor of his own hands, the astronomical observatory at Williamstown.  In this also, it is said, in advance of all others erected exclusively for purposes of instruction.  He was a devoted and profound student, as well as an accomplished teacher, of natural science.  But he was still more distinguished for his piety and his religious influence in the college.  Hundreds of students in successive classes learned to love and revere him as a holy man of God—­many of them as their spiritual father.  The history of American colleges affords probably no instance of a happier, or more remarkable, union of true science with that personal holiness and zeal for God, by which hearts are won for Christ.  Full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, he did the work of an evangelist for more than forty years—­not in the college only, but all over the town.  During the last six years of his life he devoted himself especially to the White Oaks—­a district in the north-east part of Williamstown-which had long before excited his sympathy on account of the poverty, vice, and degradation which marked the neighborhood.  He identified himself with the population by buying and carrying on a small farm among them.  He also established a Sunday-school, and then he built with the aid of friends a tasteful chapel, which was dedicated in October, 1866.  Later “the Church of Christ in the White Oaks” was organised, and here, as his failing strength allowed, he preached and labored the rest of his days.

Prof.  Hopkins was an enthusiastic lover of nature.  A few years before his death he organised a society called “The Alpine Club,” composed chiefly of young ladies, with whom, as their chosen leader, he made excursions summer after summer—­camping out often among the hills.  He took them to many a picturesque nook and retreat, of which they had never heard, in the mountains near by.  He also explored with them other interesting and remoter portions of northern Berkshire, and interpreted to them on the spot the thoughts of God, as they appeared in the infinitely varied and beautiful details of His works.  In these excursions he seemed as young as any of his young companions, with feelings as fresh and joyous as theirs.  In earlier years he was a very grave man, with something of the old Puritan sternness in his looks and ways, and he bore still the aspect of a homo gravis; but his gentleness, his tender devotion to the gay young companions who surrounded him, and the almost boyish delight with which he shared in their pleasures, took away all its sternness and lighted up his strongly-marked countenance with singular grace and beauty.  In these closing years of his life he was, indeed, the ideal of a ripe and noble Christian manhood.  His name is embalmed in the memory of a great company of his old pupils, now scattered far and wide, from the White House at Washington to the remotest corners of the earth.