Daniel Colt Oilman 49 



sciences than in other subjects, but it was inevitable that 

 the demands of his position as president of a university 

 and his naturally inquisitive and embracing mind should 

 lead him to pay keen attention to all aspects of education 

 and scholarship, however remote they might be from the 

 phases that were peculiarly his own. As early as 1871, 

 appointed by the Commissioner of Education to investi- 

 gate and report on the condition of the various scientific 

 and agricultural schools in the northern States east of the 

 Kocky Mountains, he made an elaborate report on these 

 schools and indicated therein a deep appreciation of the 

 value of a scientific research and the need of technical 

 training, subjects that became to him matters of increas- 

 ing importance as years passed by. He urged in this 

 report, and he urged constantly afterward, that the prose- 

 cution of the most rigid scientific inquiry involved no 

 hostility toward literary and classical training. The next 

 year he read a paper before the American Geographical 

 Society, reviewing a decade of geographical activity and 

 showing familiarity with the work of the departments of 

 the National Government, involving subjects such as 

 geology, hydrography, topography and surveying, botany, 

 paleontology, and ornithology, in all of which he had a 

 deep and pervading interest. Even when delivering an 

 address to the members of the graduating class of the 

 Naval Academy in 1876, in his official capacity as one of 

 the board of visitors, he combined an historical sketch 

 with an encomium upon the scientific attainments of the 

 naval service and the contributions of eminent naval 

 officials to science in general. The more one reads of 

 Dr. Gilman's earlier papers, the more is one impressed 

 with the fact that no phase of modern education and 

 modern progress lay outside the range of his eager mind, 

 and that, even before he had begun his great task of 

 founding and building this University, he had already dis- 

 closed in his printed work a breadth of view, a complexity 

 of intellectual interests, a grasp of the multiple phe- 



