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of the campus, and to the presence of 412 would-be pupils, many of whom expected to "work their way through." The brilliance of the faculty and especially of its non-resident members (including J. R. Lowell, Louis Agassiz, G. W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Theodore D. Dwight, and Goldwin Smith, who was a resident professor in 1866-1869), was to a degree over-shadowed during the fifteen years 1868-1882 by financial difficulties. But Ezra Cornell himself paid many salaries during early years, and provided much valuable equipment solely at his own expense; and because the state's land scrip was selling too low to secure an adequate endowment for the University, in 1866 he bought the land scrip yet unsold (819,920 acres)[3] by the state at the rate of sixty cents an acre on the understanding that all profits, in excess of the purchase money, should constitute a separate endowment fund to which the restrictions in the Morrill Act should not apply; and in 1866-1867 he "located" 512,000 acres in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas. In November 1874 he transferred these lands, which had cost him $576,953 more than he had received from them, to the university. This actual deficit on the lands owned by the university steadily increased up to 1881, when, after the trustees had refused (in 1880) an offer of $1,250,000 for 275,000 acres of pine lands, they sold about 140,600 acres for $2,319,296; ultimately 401,296 acres of the land turned over to the university by Cornell were sold, bringing a net return of about $4,800,000. The university was put on a sound financial footing; the number of students, less in 1881-1882 than in 1868 at the opening of the university, again increased, so that it was 585 in 1884-1885, and 2120 in 1897-1898. The presidents of the university have been: Andrew Dickson White, 1865-1885; Charles Kendall Adams, 1885-1892; and Jacob Gould Schurman. FOOTNOTES: [1] Ezra Cornell (1807-1874) was born in Westchester county, New York, on the 11th of January 1807. His parents were Quakers from Massachusetts. He received a scanty education; worked as a carpenter in Syracuse and as a machinist in Ithaca; became interested (about 1842) in the development of the electric telegraph; and after unsuccessful or over-expensive attempts to ground the telegraph wires in 1844 solved the difficulty by stringing them on poles. He organized many telegraph construction companies, was one of the found
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