All athletic sports were then in a very primitive and unorganized 

 state and it is a thousand pities that they could not have remained in 

 that condition. Coaches and training tables, except for the boat-crews, 

 were then unknown and all the elaborate and costly paraphernaUa of 

 modern college sports had not then been devised. Can any one now 

 imagine a baseball game with Yale watched by a hundred people, or so ? 

 I witnessed that in the fall of my Freshman year and, ten years later, 

 things were not very different. 



Dr. McCosh came to Princeton from Queen's College, Belfast, in 1868 

 and with him began the renascence, for his was an inspiring leadership 

 and he awakened enthusiasm among the alumni. Almost immediately 

 began that great building programme that has gone on ever since. Dr. 

 McCosh's first building was the old gymnasium, which stood on the 

 present site of Campbell Hall. Next in order came Dickinson, which 

 replaced the scandalous old classrooms of which I have spoken, and 

 which was burned down in 1920. The School of Science and the Chan- 

 cellor Green Library were finished in 1873 and, for the first time in its 

 history, the College had a hbrarian, Mr. Frederic Vinton, who came 

 from the Library of Congress. Before the Chancellor Green was built, 

 the library, of some 25,000 volumes, was housed in Nassau Hall, in 

 what is now the Faculty Room, and a professor was in charge of it. He 

 attended at certain hours of the week, to issue books to those who might 

 be so troublesome as to want them. 



Another feature in which the old College differed very markedly, 

 and much to its advantage, from the Princeton of today, was in the in- 

 comparably greater interest and importance of Whig and Clio Halls. 

 It was customary, in those days, to say that the Hall training was the 

 most valuable part of a Princeton education and there was much truth 

 in the saying. Faculty and Trustees were most zealous guardians of the 

 Halls' interests and it was in those interests that the Greek letter frater- 

 nities had been excluded. Every entering student had to sign a pledge 

 that he "would not become nor remain a member of any other secret 

 society" than Whig or Clio Hall. The Halls also exacted a similar pledge 

 from every candidate for admission to membership. In spite of this, some 

 of the fraternities had clandestine chapters in Princeton, the members 

 salving their consciences by maintaining that the pledge was void, be- 

 cause compulsory. The students (people didn't talk about undergradu- 

 ates then) disapproved of such sophistry and, so far as I could discover, 

 the great majority were opposed to the admission of the fraternities. 



C32] 



