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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE given only to those who asked for them and paid a $5 fee. Between 1868 and 1904 the College awarded 176 honorary degrees: 75 doctors of divinity, 58 masters of arts (separate from those granted in course), 2 bachelors of arts, 18 doctors of laws, 11 doctors of philosophy, 9 doctors of science, 2 doctors of literature, and 1 master of science. Most of the D.D. recipients were Lutheran pastors and alumni. Many of those awarded the M.A. were educators, some were pastors, and a few were physicians. Among those awarded the doctorate of laws were Jeremiah S. Black, Attorney General during the Buchanan administration; Alfred Stille, professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; John G. Morris; Samuel P. Sadtler; and John S. Stahr, president of Franklin and Marshall College. Recipients were not present to receive these degrees; the president simply announced that they had been conferred. Only in 1902 did the trustees direct the dean to secure diplomas to be given to those who had accepted their honorary degree.149 In 1866, only a few years after Yale University awarded the first Ph. D. degree in the United States, Gettysburg College began to use this form of recognition by conferring it as an honorary degree upon one of its own faculty members, Alfred M. Mayer. Between 1869 and 1880 it awarded the degree to eleven other people. Six of these were alumni. Hezekiah R. Geiger (1846), Samuel Aughey (1856), S. Carson Wells (1849), and William Carroll (1850) were college professors. Victor L. Conrad (1848), who succeeded Mayer as Ockershausen professor, was later associate editor of the Lutheran Observer. James Macfarlane (1837) was an attorney, author, and businessman in Towanda. Among the nonalumni recipients of the degree were Theodore G. Wormley, professor of chemistry and toxicology in the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania; Thomas J. Turner, medical inspector, United States Navy; and George W. Ruby, long-time principal of the York County Academy. As the doctorate in philosophy was becoming the highest and most respected earned degree and as an increasing number of colleges and universities were awarding it honoris causa, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Philological Association in 1881 both passed resolutions strongly urging that, henceforth, the degree be awarded only to 149The rules of the board, which were suspended from time to time, called for names of candidates to be submitted at one meeting and then voted upon at a subsequent meeting. Voting was by ballot and, beginning in 1901, a two-thirds vote was required. In 1898 a nominating committee was established to make a preliminary judgment on candidates. 31