FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



which wrecked the laboratory appropriation for a year. We 

 dissected dogs and cats, and later still-born babies which were 

 sent to us from New York, and we had many a dirty mess in 

 our early efforts to inject in the veins and arteries colored plaster- 

 of-paris in liquid form. 



The Cornell University of my undergraduate days seemed 

 wonderful to us small-town people, and yet in the light of its 

 subsequent growth, and in comparison with the many great 

 universities which have sprung up since in the United States, 

 it now seems to have been rather a primitive affair. Still there 

 were many things connected with it that made it stand out 

 prominently and brought upon it a great deal of criticism and 

 abuse. In the first place it was non-sectarian, and that was almost 

 unheard of in American collegiate institutions. And then it 

 introduced many innovations in its line of studies. Ezra Cornell, 

 its founder, was a self-made, self-educated man, who had big 

 but rather indefinite ideas. His oft-quoted statement, "I would 

 found an institution where any man can find instruction in any 

 study," was high-sounding, rather grandiloquent, and, in a way, 

 rather naively stupid, but it was very impressive to lots of us. 

 In the early Faculty there were men who had been chosen 

 for such things as a knowledge of Sanskrit, for instance, although 

 I do not remember that anyone ever took any instruction in 

 Sanskrit. However, all this has been written up again and again, 

 and the controversies of that time are now matters of history. 

 In spite of all its crudities, there was a great deal that was sound 

 and fine about the University in those days, and the fact that 

 Andrew D. White was its first President, and the other fact 

 that no less a person than Professor Goldwin Smith, who had 

 recently left the Regius Professorship of History at Oxford, and 

 had come over to Canada, came down to Ithaca and gave annual 



[lo] 



