666 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 357. 



minutes the rich vintages stored up in a 

 period of forty lustrums. 



The Collegiate School of Connecticut be- 

 gan well ; Yale College improved upon the 

 Collegiate School ; Yale University is better 

 than Yale College. The process has been 

 that of evolution, not of revolution ; un- 

 folding, not cataclysmic ; growth, and not 

 manufacture ; heredity and environment, 

 the controlling factors. What we are, we 

 owe to our ancestry and our opportunities. 

 Hence the ' Relation of Yale to Letters and 

 Science ' cannot be adequately treated with- 

 out looking outside the walls, as well as 

 inside — by considering the wilderness of 

 Quinnipiac ; the dependence of the colony 

 upon the mother country ; the bicephalous 

 State of Connecticut ; the prosperous city 

 of New Haven and its proximity to the 

 great metropolis ; and especially by consid- 

 ering what has been going on in the macro- 

 cosm of literature and knowledge where we 

 represent a microcosm. Such a survey I 

 shall not attempt, for I must keep close 

 bounds. Yet even brevity must not sup- 

 press the fact that among the original 

 colonists of New Haven, the real progen- 

 itors of Yale College, were three broad- 

 minded men of education — John Daven- 

 port, a student of Oxford and a minister in 

 London ; Theophilus Eaton, the King's 

 ambassador at the Court of Denmark ; and 

 Edward Hopkins, a merchant of enterprise 

 and fortune, and earliest benefactor of 

 American learning. Their successors also, 

 the men of 1701, James Pierpont at the 

 front, were worthy exponents of the ideas 

 they had inherited ; they were the wisest, 

 broadest and most learned men of this region 

 in that day. Liberal ideas were then in 

 the advance and, thank God, are not yet 

 in the background. 



New England brought from Old England 

 the customs, the studies, the graduates of 

 Oxford and Cambridge, not those of Scot- 

 land or France or Oermany. The exotic 



germs were nurtured by Harvard for more 

 than sixty years before the times were ripe 

 for a second college in this region. Har- 

 vard instructors, laws, courses, phrases, 

 were then adopted by the Collegiate School 

 of Connecticut, and our alma mater began 

 her life as a child of the new Cambridge and 

 a grandchild of the old. ' Harvard has nour- 

 ished Yale eighty years kindly ordered in 

 Providence,' are the words of President 

 Stiles. Yale has never ceased to be grate- 

 ful for this noble ancestry, nor broken the 

 chain of historic continuity. Yale does 

 not forget that an honorable pedigree is its 

 priceless possession, and delights to-day to 

 honor its ancestry. 



The seventeenth century was not the 

 most brilliant period of university educa- 

 tion in the mother country. The functions 

 of universities had been usurped by colleges. 

 Their scope was restricted ; their regulations 

 rigid and petty. Science and letters were 

 subordinate to logic and grammar, and the 

 maintenance of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, 

 the new school made the best of it — and 

 while still without a fixed habitation or a 

 name, acquired both influence and reputa- 

 tion. It began with books, not bricks ; 

 with teachers, the best that could be had ; 

 ^nd with ideas in respect to intellectual 

 discipline which soon bore fruit in the 

 service of Church and State, 



The division between our first and second 

 centuries, corresponding with the eighteenth 

 and nineteenth centuries of our era, is not 

 simply determined by the calendar. There 

 are two periods to be considered as well as 

 two centuries, each deriving its characteris- 

 tiq^ from the spirit of the age. The first 

 of these, our forefathers went through the 

 good old colony times of dependence upon 

 England ; the Eevolution ; the establish- 

 ment of constitutional government ; and the 

 enlargement of national life and hope. It 

 was the period too when a free church was 

 to be established in a free state, when Chris- 



