552 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



great work that should be done in the great State of New York. 

 Surely, he said, in the greatest State there should be the greatest 

 of universities ; in central New York there should arise a univer- 

 sity which, by the amplitude of its endowment and by the whole 

 scope of its intended sphere, by the character of the studies in the 

 whole scope of the curriculum, should satisfy the wants of the 

 hour. More than that, said he, it should begin at the beginning. 

 It should take hold of the chief interest of this country, which is 

 agriculture ; then it should rise step by step, grade by grade 

 until it fulfilled the highest ideal of what a university could be. 

 . . . Until the hour was late this young scholar dreamed aloud to 

 me these dreams." 



Now, in the year 1862 an act had passed Congress for the en- 

 dowment of the higher education throughout the country, from 

 the great landed domain of the nation. Every State was to re- 

 ceive for each of its representatives in Congress thirty thousand 

 acres of the public land with which each should endow " at least 

 one college," where, " without excluding other scientific and clas- 

 sical studies," such branches as are related to agriculture and the 

 mechanic arts should forever be taught. To New York, as the 

 most populous State, came thus nearly a million of acres. This 

 superb fund, provisionally bestowed by the State on a small exist- 

 ing institution, seemed likely in 1864 to fall back into its hands 

 through a failure to comply with the conditions of the gift. Mr. 

 White strenuously opposed all suggestions for the division of the 

 fund, urging as the only worthy policy for the higher education 

 the concentration of resources. It was in the struggle over this 

 question that he was brought into close relations with his col- 

 league from Tompkins County, Ezra Cornell a stern, shrewd old 

 man, of Quaker birth and breeding, who had migrated in his 

 youth, a roving mechanic, into western New York, where, after 

 making one fortune. in milling and losing it in farming, he had 

 built up a vaster one through his connection with the spread of 

 the electric telegraph, and now, in his declining years, was casting 

 about for a worthy public use for his wealth. The two men were 

 strangely unlike, and as to the division of the land grant they 

 had been sharply opposed; but each had learned to prize the 

 other, and it was to his young fellow-Senator that the old Quaker 

 now turned for advice. The result was the offer, by Ezra Cornell 

 to the State of New York, of five hundred thousand dollars for 

 the further endowment of a great university, if the State would 

 transfer to it the public lands and would locate it in his own 

 town of Ithaca. 



It is needless here to recount further the tangled story of the 

 establishment of Cornell University, or to describe the happy 

 policy by which the nation's gift, frittered away for a song by 



