THE HARVARD ANNEX 193 
only source for some of the data that are of consequence in 
a memoir of Mrs. Agassiz, whose relation to the institution 
cannot be understood without a clear conception of its 
unique aims and the gradual process of its growth. 
The history of the beginnings of Radcliffe College has 
been told by Mr. Gilman himself in an article on Mrs. 
Agassiz that appeared in the Harvard Graduates’ M. agazine 
for September, 1907, in a chapter contributed by him to a 
book of which he was the editor, The Cambridge of Eighteen 
Hundred and Ninety-Siz, in a short paper, The Society for 
the Collegiate Instruction of Women, published in 1891, and 
in a pleasant sketch written for the Radcliffe Magazine for 
June, 1905; an excellent article on the college by Mr. 
Joseph B. Warner, its first treasurer, may also be found 
in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine for March, 1894. But 
although the somewhat unusual story of the institution 
has not lacked narrators, it acquires a fresh interest when 
looked at from the angle of Mrs. Agassiz’s part in the plot, 
and when it unfolds itself chapter by chapter as the princi- 
pal characters in it record the events that they were them- 
selves shaping. How Mrs. Agassiz entered on the scene we 
learn from the following items at the beginning of Mr. 
Gilman’s Notes. 
1878, November 25. My wife has for two years 
urged upon me the need that exists in Cambridge 
for an institution for the higher education of women. 
Lately we have considered the matter more thoroughly. 
...A plan has occurred to me. Suppose I find a 
number of ladies wanting to get the same educa- 
tion that men have and I will tell them, ‘I will 
arrange a course exactly the same that Harvard 
