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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1038 



inspired with the ideal of taking the inevitable 

 next step upward, as indeed were all the other 

 members of our original faculty, which was 

 remarkable, if not unpredecented in this coun- 

 try, in its quality. Of the no less notable orig- 

 inal board of trustees, every member of which 

 has now passed away (while death has not once 

 invaded the ranks of our professorial corps), 

 the triumvirate, Hoar, Devens and "Washburn, 

 who stood nearest to Mr. Clark, as his execu- 

 tive committee of all work, estimated the re- 

 sources that were ultimately to be at our dis- 

 posal at from eight to twelve million dollars, 

 and very likely more. 



I was at the outset sent on an eight months' 

 trip to Europe, with several score letters of in- 

 troduction, including one from the national 

 government which gave me access to the in- 

 side workings of Eultus Ministeria and uni- 

 versity circles and archives, so that my trip 

 constituted a pedagogic journey I think al- 

 most without precedent. Twenty-five years 

 ago these very weeks I was on this unique mis- 

 sion and was surprised to find the most emi- 

 nent men of learning in Europe profoundly 

 interested in it, and so lavish with their time, 

 sympathy and counsel. I was entertained by 

 Lord Kelvin, Pasteur, Helmholtz, Jowett, and 

 some scores of others of the greatest living 

 leaders in scientific thought; went on a trip 

 of inspection of German universities as the 

 guest of the Prussian Minister of Education, 

 von Gosslar; perhaps most embarrassing 

 of all, was taken in state by General Trepa- 

 noff on a visit to the two great Eussian mili- 

 tary schools near St. Petersburg, in each of 

 which an all-day's program of military evo- 

 lutions had been arranged for my special edi- 

 fication ; was a guest of honor at a meeting of 

 Swedish universities, etc. My instructions 

 from Mr. Clark had been to see everything 

 and every institution possible, collect building 

 plans, budgets, administration methods of 

 every kind, and find out a few of the best men 

 who might be willing to come to a new insti- 

 tution here, but to engage no one, but to be 

 ready to negotiate with them later. The 

 amazement to me was how lavish everybody 

 was of advice, how cherished and often how 



elaborate were the ideals of university men, 

 many if not most of whom seemed to have 

 imagined installations of their own depart- 

 ments rivaling not only Bacon's House of 

 Solomon, but sometimes almost suggesting 

 apocryphal vision. From my voluminous 

 notes of that trip could be compiled ideals 

 lofty, numerous and far-reaching enough to 

 inspire all the universities of the world for 

 a century, and to organize a new one here for 

 the conduct of which ten times ten million 

 dollars would be sadly inadequate. 



They gave me plans of the then new four- 

 million-dollar university building at Vienna, 

 of the new Sorbonne at Paris, its rival, of 

 the complete new university which Bismarck 

 had established at Strassburg to show Alsace- 

 Lorraine, which Germany had just annexed, 

 and to show especially France, what the Teu- 

 tons really meant by higher education, of the 

 newly built university at Kiel, in which Ger- 

 many sought to impress upon the Scandi- 

 navians the same object-lesson in her newly 

 acquired Schleswig-Holstein, and which was 

 designed to compete with the neighboring 

 university of Copenhagen, just as she re- 

 habilitated Koenigsburg to impress the same 

 lesson upon the nearby Russian rival institu- 

 tion at Dorpat. I was given in some cases 

 the secret etat and the unprinted Statuien of 

 the universities, — all this until I felt an al- 

 most Tarpeian embarrassment, especially as 

 I was in nearly all these places utterly un- 

 known and an object of interest solely because 

 of my unique mission. I found young pro- 

 fessors prone to see visions, and old ones to 

 dream dreams, each for his own department, 

 that all a king's ransom would be inadequate 

 to make real. Of all this I wrote Mr. Clark 

 and my colleagues here awaiting the great 

 instauration. The harvest home-coming, with 

 all these sheaves of suggestion and inspira- 

 tion, marked the zenith of great expectation 

 and of hope tiptoe on the mountain-top. 

 For years and sometimes even yet, European 

 savants who first heard of Worcester from me 

 and have since known it only as the home of 

 Clark University, seemed often, to our great 

 embarrassment, to assume that many or most 



