Professor Brinton was a productive scholar in addition to his teaching chores. In his bibliography of 15 books the best known was The Anatomy of Revolution, which he first wrote in 1938. It brought him a reputation which has endured the test of time.

In February of this year Professor Brinton was invited to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as one of five "experts in revolution." There he gave the Committee a "lesson on revolution" with particular emphasis on Vietnam.

In his book on revolutions he compared four different examples, and made several cautious conclusions. In an Epilogue he added to the book in 1964 he found "a residue of uniformites." One such uniformity, he felt, "needs special emphasis" for a very strong current in American opinion tends to reject it... most Americans believe revolutions are initiated and carried through by underdogs against upperdogs. This in itself is basically true, if platitudinous. But they think of the underdogs as poverty-stricken, deprived of relatively simple material satisfactions, oppressed, enslaved, without education (which their masters have denied them), strong only in their numbers."

Instead, Brinton found, "Though full feeding makes most beats quiet, this is not so of homo sapiens . . . if he has a full or tolerably full belly and a grieviance . . . he will make a revolution." And, he added, "This is the uniformity Americans really must master if we are to adjust ourselves to a world we cannot wholly remake."

Brinton also wrote a widely used textbook, on A History of Civilization.

In 1944, Brinton wrote for the 25th Year Report of his class: "At present there are still a few ragged edges on my Weltanschauung. The more malicious among you will no doubt understand if I say that, whereas in 1919 I though of myself as a liberal with at least an initial capital, I now think of myself as a liberal in inverted commas.

"As a Harvard freshman I was an innocent rationalist and Wilsonian Democrat. Even while I was an undergraduate, and with the generous enthusiasm of my tutor Harold Laski to fortify me, the influence of the late Irving Babbitt began to undermine the foundations of that belief."

In a sense, I have been ever since trying to reconcile the contrary influences of Laski and Babbitt. Towards that reconciliation--which would no doubt be unsatisfactory to both men--I have been greatly helped by my friendship with the late Lawrence Henderson. Briefly, my earlier optimistic rationalism has been tempered by an awarness of the place of prejudices, sentiments, the unconscious, and the subconscious in human life.

"Like most of my generation, I have had to try to swallow Freud, Pavlov, Marx, and Pareto, as well as the more indigestible lumps which are not books, but experience...I think I have kept to the basic belief of my youth in the rightness--do I really wish to put it as righteousness?--of human reason. You may write me down as born in the eighteenth century and yet not too umcomfortable--not at any rate schizophrenic--in the mid-twentieth."

Last spring when the Yearbook decided to write about the older members of the Harvard faculty including Crane Brinton, the article concluded, "To mark the passing of a great man is not to strike a mournful note, but merely to reflect upon the time-table of a career. For every end there is always, somewhere, a new beginning; and it is a funny but accepted truth that the many who start are always overshadowed by the few who finish.