I never received any offer of an appointment elsewhere. One youngster 

 on the Princeton Faculty has had seven calls and men Uke Russell and 

 Conklin have probably stopped counting theirs. Not that I ever wished 

 to leave Princeton; my roots here are far too deep for that, but it is 

 not flattering to my self-esteem that no one else has ever desired my 

 services. 



Not long ago, I saw, for the first time, a letter from one of my aunts, 

 describing the melancholy Commencement of 1880. Dr. McCosh did a 

 very unusual thing in publicly announcing that "the Trustees had made 

 an appointment, the day before, which he thought would add to the 

 efficiency of the College. Mr. William B. Scott had been appointed in- 

 structor in geology (to assist Dr. Guyot). Mr. Scott has made some 

 original researches in biology, which have attracted the attention of 

 scientific men abroad." Shortly before his lamentable death, my dear 

 friend, Dean H. B. Fine, was speaking to me of that same melancholy 

 Commencement, at which he graduated. He told me that he had deUv- 

 ered the Latin Salutatory to an audience of only about a hundred 

 people; that the whole College had been dismissed weeks before and 

 that very few of the graduating class had come back to receive their 

 diplomas. 



The cause of all this was the devastating epidemic of typhoid fever 

 which raged among the students in the spring of 1880. I have not the 

 figures at hand, but I know that there was a large number of cases and 

 several deaths occurred, with some particularly sad cases of suicide in 

 delirium. In those days, nobody in America understood the nature of 

 typhoid, or the manner of infection. The epidemic was erroneously 

 attributed to certain waterclosets which had been put in the dormitories 

 and these were hastily ripped out. As an additional precaution, a com- 

 pany was formed to secure a supply of pure water although no one then 

 knew that the source of the trouble lay in the tainted wells from which 

 the drinking water was drawn. 



This epidemic was the second of the disasters in Dr. McCosh's admin- 

 istration, which so retarded Princeton's growth; for years the student 

 body hardly increased at all and gifts of money almost ceased. The ill- 

 wishers of Princeton, in general, and of Dr. McCosh in particular, 

 seized the opportunity to make a savage attack on the College for 

 criminal negligence, sacrificing the lives of its students by apathetic and 

 slack management. This attack did untold damage and was entirely 

 unjust. Before and after that time, epidemics occurred in other college 

 towns and the leniency with which they were treated in the newspapers 



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