OBITUARY NOTICES. 
491 
Hence it is easy to see that the number and quality and 
arrangement of studies in a university course are not arbi¬ 
trarily fixed by educators, but are the outgrowth of man’s 
intellectual tendencies in the past and the highest expres¬ 
sion of his intellectual wants in the present, as they are the 
indispensable conditions of future intellectual progress.” 
In this address was foreshadowed the belief that in the near 
future advantage would be taken of the felicity of position 
and the Columbian college become a university.” 
He at once put in motion those forces which he thought 
best suited to bring about this ultimatum, securing first of 
all the adoption by the Legislative Assembly of the District 
of Columbia of an amended charter which permitted the 
college corporation to become a selfperpetuating body, then 
the passing by Congress of an act providing, amongst other 
changes, that the corporation “ shall hereafter be known and 
called by the name of The Columbian University.” 
Acting on a suggestion received from Mr. Corcoran, he 
recommended that measures should be initiated for raising 
a permanent endowment fund. The steps then taken re¬ 
sulted, through many windings and hindrances, in the 
establishment of the Corcoran endowment, which constituted 
the first working endowment the University ever had. 
It is w T ell to note that in his annual and special reports to 
the University authorities and in his presentation‘of the 
claims of the institution for larger support or better endow¬ 
ments he gave, with the insight of a philosopher, a just 
estimate of the wealth of available material in the scientific 
plant of Washington, the impulse given to higher work by 
the advanced investigations here prosecuted, and the aid 
that could come from the army of scholars who make this 
city their home. 
His presidential duties were very absorbing and left him 
but little time for extra-university work. However, we find 
him in 1877 accepting membership in the board of trustees 
of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1884 he was made a 
regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and in the same year 
