10 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
common people in the person of our Founder, Ezra Cornell, and the precious 
scholarship and broad human sympathies of our first President, Andrew D. 
White, came David Starr Jordan. He had an instinct for men, and for good 
teachers as well as for science; and to-day we have a letter of his written for the 
occasion from Australia. By the rarest good fortune this message from one of 
Professor Comstock’s very first students is to be read by one of Dr. Jordan’s 
students, who is also one of the very last students taught by Professor Comstock. 
LETTER FROM PRESIDENT DAVID STARR JORDAN 
Read by Mrs. Ruby G. Smith 
I am sorry that I cannot be present on this great occasion. I have 
to remember Comstock as one of the very ablest of my students and 
as one of the most inspiring of my teachers, a complex fact that is 
the text for what I have to say. 
Comstock and I have been in close relation for almost half a cen¬ 
tury, together in spirit all the time and for a fourth of the period 
together in bodily fact. 
Besides the young enthusisam and the blessed poverty we shared 
together in the old Cornell, we stood also doubly in the relation of 
teacher and student. The name of college “instructor” had just then 
(in 1870) been invented in academic circles for subordinate teachers 
and we were both “instructors.” In those far-off days, Comstock 
taught me all I know and most that I have forgotten of insects and 
insect life while I taught him the names and habits of the flowers of 
Western New York. 
Such a combination works finely both ways, for the teacher’s 
best rewards lie in the school of thinkers and observers he builds up 
around him; and the fairest memories of the scholar center around 
those who have led him to see and to think. At both ends of the line 
I find Comstock. We were boys in those days, boy-teachers as well 
as boy-scholars, young enough and green enough in all conscience, 
but we could “egg each other on, comrades in zeal”; the beginning of 
a process to which men finally give loftier names. 
Now after forty-four years, I may freely tell a story which, so far 
as I know, has never been told before. In those days, it was believed 
that prizes were a help to scholarship. This is a fallacy. A prize 
may help a scholar sometimes, but not scholarship. That is for¬ 
ever its own reward. Old notions of education withered on every 
side under the clear gaze of our epoch-making young President, but 
this one fallacy slipped by unnoticed. 
