Gilman.l ;>,) ^ [March r>, 



versity is education, its secondary object is research ; while 

 the converse is true of the academy, which should always 

 make its major task investigation, and its minor instruc- 

 tion. The best university will include among its professors 

 those who can advance the sciences to which they are devo- 

 ted, and among the associates of an academy there will 

 always be those who are capable and ready to diffuse among 

 men the knowledge discovered. The university will develop 

 the talents of youth, the academy will task the powers 

 of full grown men. Universities plant seed ; academies 

 reap fruit. 



I do not indulge in these antitheses for the sake of rhetori- 

 cal amplitude; but because, in response to the sentiment 

 which has been proposed, it seemed to me well to emphasize 

 at once the unity of purpose and the diversity of method 

 which are characteristic of these complex institutions, and 

 the need there is of giving both full scope. 



There are always strong men in a community to whom 

 universities do not offer a career. Leibnitz, at the beginning 

 of the Royal Academy of Berlin, and Humboldt in its later 

 days, are examples of scholars who found in learned societies 

 and not in universities, the spheres of their activity. New- 

 ton on the other hand was efficient both in the University of 

 Cambridge and in the Royal Society of London ; and in our 

 own day Sylvester has been equally active as a university 

 professor and as a contributor to academic deliberations and 

 memoirs. Two of our countrymen, as the biographer of one 

 has shown us,* both named Benjamin, both born in Massachu- 

 setts, both devoted to experimental physics, both resident 

 in foreign lands, — Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders 

 of this Society, and Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, 



•Rev. G. i ' Me, D.D., in his Life of Rumford. 



