1902.] THE CONNECTICUT AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE. II9 



appears in the first prospectus, but he seems to have disap- 

 peared from the school during the first year. The first or 

 second year, I do not know which, Dr. Armsby was made 

 acting principal. Prof. B. F. Koons appeared as principal 

 in the report of 1883, and he held the position of principal and 

 president until 1898, a period of sixteen years of honorable 

 service. In 1898 Mr. George W. Flint was appointed to the 

 presidency, and held his position for three years. And on the 

 night of September 12th this last fall I received a telegram 

 saying: " You are president pro tan. Come down." And 

 believing that to " come down " was to come up, I responded 

 to that telegram. 



These, then, are a few of the most salient facts in the de- 

 velopment of the institution from its beginning. 



But you would make a mistake if you went away from 

 this hall with the notion that this college is nothing but a 

 State institution. It started, as I have said, in private 

 philanthropy, and it has been fostered by the State from the 

 first year of its existence until the present; but since 1893 by 

 far the larger proportion of its regular annual income has come 

 from the national government. From that date until the pres- 

 ent the Connecticut Agricultural College has been a State 

 college, but it has also been a land-grant college; and as a 

 land-grant college it is one of a large number of similar in- 

 stitutions. There are sixty-five such institutions in the United 

 States, each of the states and territories having one with the 

 exception of Alaska. 



These colleges were founded by an act of Congress which 

 was formulated and passed under the advice and leadership, 

 and in fact almost wholly through the instrumentality of the 

 Hon. Justin F. Morrill of Vermont, for a long time United 

 States Senator from that State, as most of you know. On 

 July 2, 1862, in the midst of our Civil War, and all the storm 

 and stress of that critical period. Congress appropriated to 

 each of the states certain amounts of income to be derived 

 from the sale of public lands. These sums were to gto to 

 the different states, were to be securely invested, and their 

 income at a specified rate was to become a perpetual fund 

 which the states accepting the terms of the national govern- 

 ment guaranteed to maintain. That income, or those funds, 

 according to the conditions of the grant, cannot be diminished 

 by any process whatsoever. 



