838 DANIEL COIT OILMAN. 



A. Walker in the early eighties, were abundantly assured of the fact 

 that President Oilman's broad and noble ideals were indeed becoming 

 realities, and realities of great influence as examples the country over. 

 On the occasion of Mr. Oilman's retirement after twenty-five years 

 of service, Mr. Eliot's address specifies three great achievements: 

 the creation of a school of graduate studies, the prodigious advance- 

 ment of medical teaching, and the promotion of scientific investiga- 

 tion. The first overtures looking to Mr. Oilman's appointment as 

 president of the Carnegie Institution came some six months after his 

 resignation of the presidency of the university. Although past the limit 

 of three score and ten, he served the Institution for three years at the 

 critical time when the fundamental purposes of so novel an undertaking 

 were yet to be determined. 



Of the amount and variety of Mr. Oilman's public service outside 

 the sphere of strictly official duty, it is not feasible in a brief paragraph 

 to give an adequate idea. The very important position of Superin- 

 tendent of the Schools of New York City he felt obliged in 1896 to 

 decline. But as member of the Board of School Commissioners of 

 Baltimore, as president of the Slater Fund for the Education of Freed- 

 men, as member of the Oeneral Education Board, as a trustee of the 

 Russell Sage Foundation, as president of the National Civil Service 

 Reform League, and of the American Oriental Society (with whose 

 early history and most eminent members he was intimately ac- 

 quainted), he was a fellow-worker of amazing constancy and faithful- 

 ness, — "a, fellow -worker," for he always thought and spoke of his 

 associates, not as subordinates, but as colleagues. 



As one looks back on Mr. Oilman's presidency at Baltimore, it 

 seems as if he could not have fitted himself better for it, even if he had 

 known that just that was to l)e the main business of his life. His 

 personal acquaintance with men eminent in science and letters, men 

 like Huxley and Cayley and Lord Kelvin, men like Lowell and Child 

 and ^Yhitney, his wide and studious observation of great technical 

 schools and his experience in the building up of the one at Yale, his 

 realization of the unity of knowledge, his intelligent comprehension 

 of the aims of the most diverse fields of study, — these were factors of 

 his equipment for the work of "naturalizing in America the ixilea of a 

 true university." Many men of equal industry and force have failed 

 because they did not realize as he did " the inanity of rivalry, the 

 pettiness of jealousy, and the joyfulness of association for the good of 

 mankind." The informing principle of his life was service to others. 

 As an old-time New Englander, he was brought up in obedience to 



