ANNUAL ADDRESS. XXIII. 



promptly and sympathetically answered, and their interests 

 were never forgotten. He died, suddenly, as I have 

 occasion to remember, on his birthday and mine, as he sat 

 in his study chair at Cornell. Fittingly enough the sum of 

 £50,000 is being collected to erect a memorial laboratory 

 for research in engineering to his memory, but such bene- 

 factors of his race as lie, require no monument. 



SIBLEY COLLEGE. 



This is not the place to discuss in detail the organisation 

 of the Sibley College of Engineering, although on a fitting 

 occasion few subjects might more usefully be considered. 

 Perhaps if it needs any expression of commendation it may 

 best be had by reminding you of the great success which 

 the University of Birmingham in England is achieving, and 

 which, as is unstintedly admitted, obtained its inspiration 

 largely from Cornell and Sibley. Sibley College was one 

 of the early departments of Cornell University to be estab- 

 lished, and accorded well with the ideal of Ezra Cornell, 

 the quaint, shrewd man of business, of rather the old type, 

 who conceived the idea of founding a great and truly 

 democratic University; and though perhaps it lacks a 

 certain glamour that attaches to the older New England 

 Colleges, such as Harvard and Yale, whose history goes 

 back to the early Puritan days, yet from a fairly iirtimate 

 knowledge of all three, I venture to think that nowhere is 

 the democratic ideal of American education better illus- 

 trated than in the Cornell of to-day. The University 

 begins to realise, at least in some degree, the hopes of its 

 large minded founder, who remarked in words which sound, 

 in their simplicity, plain, but which embody a very noble 

 thought, "I would found here an institution where any 

 person may receive instruction in any subject." "Cornell," 

 said a well known English educator — Principal Fairbairn of 

 Mansfield College, Oxford — "is an example of a University 



