Address by Professor Baldwin. xxxiii 



in combustion, the weight of the products being equal to the 

 weight of the constituents. 



As we look back on the century which closes to-day, we cannot 

 but see that the Connecticut Academy of 1799 was Yale College 

 in another form. 



In one sense it was a higher form, for it was a reaching forward 

 to a broader field of acquirements and achievements than any 

 college could lay open. It was a movement towards bringing to 

 New Haven the life of a University, — the first movement ; for the 

 ('..liege had done nothing beside College'work, save in the single 

 line of theology. 



Most of the original members of the Academy were graduates 

 of Yale, and, if we except Dr. Webster, the leaders among them 

 were actively connected witli its faculty or board of government. 



From such a body, formed in the eighteenth century, nothing 

 was to be expected in the line of technical or abstract research. 



For that the mind even of their great chief, President Dwight, 

 avrs unfitted. He had large executive ability, and remarkable 

 powers of close observation and forcible statement. But he was 

 no scholar, as we now count scholarship. 



The same thing may be said of his colleague Silliman. He had 

 the art of teaching others what he knew himself. He was active 

 in gathering facts upon which later science might build theories. 

 But he was one of those from whose followers some soon must 

 come to outstrip him. 



It was not indeed until the second half of this first century of 

 our existence that a generation of professed scholars existed in the 

 United States. The material of our college faculties before that 

 time was taken from the church, the bar, or the medical profes- 

 sion.* There were no doctors of philosophy. Dr. Shepard and 

 Dr. Percival, who made, as has been said, the geological survey 

 of Connecticut, were doctors of medicine. We are apt to forget 

 how short was the entire list of college presidents and professors 

 in the United States at the close of the eighteenth century. 

 Instead of the thousands whom we can count to-day, they hardly 



* Much of the teaching was done, as it still is in our professional schools, by 

 men whose life was mainly devoted to other pursuits, to which their connection 

 with the college was merely an incident. See Life of Francis Wayland, I, 210. 



