SCIENCE.-SUPPLEMENT. 



FRIDAY, JULY 9, 18t<6. 



THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSITIES.' 

 No one can visit Cambridge this summer with- 

 it remembering that two hundred and fifty years 

 ,0 an acorn was here planted from which an oak 

 IS grown. No scholar can come from a distant 

 ite without wishing to offer his tribute, however 

 adequate it may be, to tlie wisdom which has 

 iverned the counsels of Harvard through eight 

 merations. A graduate of Yale will, I trust, be 

 rdoned for associating the name of his own alma 

 iter with that of her elder sister. Their united 

 fluence has not only been strong in New Eng- 

 ad, bvit strong in other portions of the land. It 

 diflicult to surmise Avhat would have been the 

 ndition of American society if these foundations 

 ,d never existed. 'Their graduates have pro- 

 oted the literature, the science, the statesman- 

 ip, and the religion of the land ; but more than 

 is is true. Their methods of instruction, their 

 iwritten laws, their high endeavors, and their 

 ademic spirit have re-appeared in each ne sv state 



the west, as each new state has initiated its 

 cial order. To be governed by the experience 

 Harvard and Yale is in many an educa- 

 »nal court an appeal to common law. To 

 tablish another Harvard or another Yale, to 

 irture the germ from which a great university 

 ight grow, has been the aspiration of many a 

 triot, of many a Cliristian. It was a laureate 



both Harvard and Yale, the sagacious Manas- 

 h Cutler, who initiated the policy of securing 



the states beyond the Alleghanies a certain 

 rtion of the public lands for the foundation of 

 li versifies. Among the pioneers of California 

 is one who went from New^ England * with col- 

 je on the bram ; ' and now every ship which 

 ters the Golden Gate faces the buildings of a 

 liversity which Henry Durant did much to 

 tabUsh. 



The history of higher education as guided by the 

 'O oldest foundations in this country may be con- 

 lered in four periods : in the first, extending 

 jm the earliest settlement until the revolution, 

 e English college idea was dominant in its sim- 

 est form ; the second , following the severance of 

 iegiance to the crown, was the time when profes- 



1 An address before the Phi Beta Kappa society of 

 iryard college, July 1, 1886, by Daniel C. Gilman, presi- 

 nt of the Johns Hopkins university. 



sional schools in medicine, law, and theology v^'ere 

 begun ; the third, beginning about the middle of 

 this centiu-y, was marked by the formation of 

 scientific schools ; and in the present period we are 

 looking for tlie fulfilment of the university ideal, 

 brought hither by tlie earliest immigrants from 

 England. 



The colonial vocabulary was modest. Whatever 

 else it might be, ' university ' seemed a very great 

 noun, to be used as guardedly as ' episcopacy ' or 

 ' sovereignty.' In the eai'liest mention I remember 

 of the cradle of Harvard, the alternative is found, 

 ' a school or coUedge ; ' and in Connecticut, ' col- 

 legiate school ' was in vogue for seventeen years. 

 " We on pvirpose gave your academy as low a 

 name as we could that it might the better stand in 

 wind and weather," said the well-known civilians 

 who were consulted in 1701 by Pierpont and his 

 colleagues at the mouth of the Quinnipiac. Else- 

 whei'e, under other influences, tliere was not the 

 same caution, nor the same success. Several 

 years before the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, 

 the Virginia company determined to set apart, at 

 Henrico, ten thousand acres of land for ' a univer- 

 sity,' including one thousand for a college ' for 

 the children of the infidels.' There was another 

 project for a university as early as 1624, which 

 has lately been brought to light. Dr. E. D. Neill, 

 in ' Virginia Vetusta,' calls attention to the fact 

 that an island in the Susquehanna, which the 

 traveller may see to the north as he crosses the 

 railroad-bridge at Havre de Grace, wag condition- 

 ally given for " the foundinge and maintenance 

 of a universitie and such schools in Virginia as 

 shall there be erected and shall be called Acade- 

 mia Virginiensis et Oxoniensis.'" The death of 

 the projector, Edward Palmer, interrupted his 

 plans. 



Mr. Dexter has established the fact, that, before 

 1647, nearly a hundred graduates of English uni- 

 versHies had migrated to New England, three- 

 fourths of whom were from Cambridge ; and the 

 elaborate volumes of Mullinger exhibit in great 

 fulness the conditions of collegiate and university 

 life as they were known to these Cambridge wan- 

 derers in the earliest half of the seventeenth cen- 

 tm-y. It is evident that the university idea was 

 then subordinate to the collegiate ; logic was rid- 

 ing a high horse ; science and literature, as then 

 represented by mathematics and Greek, were alike 

 undervalued. An anecdote recorded by Mullinger 

 reveals at a glance the situation. "SethWard, 



