DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 



1705 



DARWIN 



laid out, has many fine residences, and has 

 excellent facilities for boating and bathing. 

 It also has manufacturing industries of im- 

 portance; chief among its products are refined 

 sugar, lumber, chocolate, spice, corn meal, beer, 

 soap and bolts. Dartmouth was founded in 

 1749, the same year as Halifax. Population 

 in 1911, 5,058; in 1916, about 5,500. 



DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, at Hanover, N. H., 

 one of the oldest American colleges, is the out- 

 growth of a charity school for poor Indians. 

 The Indian school was established in 1754 

 at Lebanon, Conn., but in 1770 was removed 

 to Hanover. Meanwhile, its friends had raised 

 an endowment fund, and it had been decided to 

 admit whites as well as Indians. The endow- 

 ment fund was placed in the hands of a board 

 of trustees, of which William, the second Earl 

 of Dartmouth, was chairman. A large tract 

 of land in New Hampshire was given to the 

 school, and in 1769 King George III signed 

 a charter for Dartmouth College, named in 

 honor of its chief patron. The college began 

 existence in log huts in the midst of a wilder- 

 ness, and the first permanent building, Dart- 

 mouth Hall, was not completed until 1791. 

 The Revolutionary War put an end to most 

 of the support from England, but gradually the 

 attendance and endowment were increased. 



The college now confers degrees in arts, 

 letters, science, civil engineering and %nedicine, 

 has 120 instructors and almost 1,500 students. 

 The medical school dates from 1798 and the 

 Thayer School of Engineering from 1867. The 

 Amos Tuck School of Administration and Fi- 

 nance, founded in 1900, was the first commer- 

 cial school in the United States to accept only 

 college graduates as regular students. An en- 

 dowment fund of $4,000,000 and an annual 

 tuition fee of $140 for each student provides 

 most of the college revenue. 



Many distinguished men are numbered among 

 the graduates of Dartmouth, including three 

 eminent statesmen Daniel Webster, Thaddeus 

 Stevens and Salmon P. Chase. 



Dartmouth College Case, one of the most im- 

 portant cases ever decided by the Supreme 

 Court of the United States. The court held 

 that a charter granted by a state was a con- 

 tract, and that any attempt by the state to 

 alter it was unconstitutional, because "no state 

 shall . . . pass any . . .. law impairing 

 the obligation of contracts" (Constitution of 

 the United States, Art. I, Sec. 10). The case 

 arose from a religious and political struggle for 

 the control of the college. The state legislature 



had amended the charter by adding eleven new 

 trustees to outvote the old members of the 

 board, but the latter, with Daniel Webster 

 for attorney, carried the case to the Supreme 

 Court. The decision was handed down by 

 Chief Justice Marshall in 1819. 



DAR'WIN, CHARLES ROBERT (1809-1882), a 

 distinguished English naturalist, whose epoch- 

 making work, The Origin of Species by Means 

 of Natural Selection, published in 1859, laid 

 the foundation for the development of the 

 theory of evolu- 

 tion (which see). 

 His career shows 

 the power of he- 

 reditary influence, 

 for his grand- 

 father, Erasmus 

 Darwin, was a 

 naturalist of some 

 distinction, and 

 his father, Robert 

 Waring Darwin, 

 was a fellow of 

 the Royal Soci- 

 ety. Charles CHARLES DARWIN 

 Robert was educated at the University of 

 Edinburgh, and at Christ College, Cambridge, 

 graduating in 1831. 



His father had hoped to see his son become 

 a clergyman, but the young man's liking for 

 natural history overshadowed other interests, 

 and not long after his graduation he eagerly 

 accepted an offer to sail with the British sur- 

 veying expedition on the steamship Beagle, in 

 the capacity of naturalist. The expedition 

 made a five-years' tour of the world (1831- 

 1836), affording Darwin an extraordinary op- 

 portunity for original research and study of 

 plant and animal life, and giving him the basic 

 ideas upon which he built his theories of evo- 

 lution. 



On his return to England he began the prep- 

 aration of a series of important scientific work*, 

 culminating in 1859 in his Origin of Species. 

 Up to this time it had been generally believed 

 that each kind of animal was descended from 

 a like species, that dogs had always been dogs, 

 and tigers had always been tigers, and that the 

 division of the animal kingdom into species 

 was due to special acts of creation. But Dar- 

 win's explanation of the origin of species wu> 

 based on the law of natural selection, or the 

 survival of the fittest. That is, in the plant 

 and animal world, vast numbers of individuals 

 are produced, but in the struggle for existence 



