of expense, the best education this continent
affords. Such is the difference between public and private patronage,
between individual effort and the action of a State.

A proof of the broad intent and oecumenical consciousness of this
infant College appears in the fact that its Medical Department, which
alone numbers ten professors and five hundred students, allows the
option of one of four languages in the thesis required for the medical
degree. It is the only seminary in the country whose liberal scope and
cosmopolitan outlook satisfy the idea of a great university. Compared
with this, our other colleges are all provincial; and unless the State
of Massachusetts shall see fit to adopt us, and to foster our interest
with something of the zeal and liberality which the State of Michigan
bestows on her academic masterpiece, Harvard cannot hope to compete with
this precocious child of the West.

Meanwhile, Alumni, the State has devolved upon us, as electors of the
Board of Overseers, an important trust. This trust conveys no right of
immediate jurisdiction, but it may become the channel of an influence
which shall make itself felt in the conduct of this University. It
invites us to take counsel concerning her wants and her weal. I
therefore pursue the theme which this crisis in our history suggests.

Of existing universities the greater part are the product of an age
whose intellectual fashion differed as widely from the present as it did
from that of Greek and Roman antiquity. Our own must be reckoned with
that majority, dating, as it does, from a period antecedent, not only to
all other American colleges, but to some of the most eminent of other
lands. Half of the better known and most influential of German
universities are of later origin than ours. The University of Goettingen,
once the most flourishing in Germany, is younger than Harvard by a
hundred years. Halle is younger, and Erlangen, and Munich with its vast
library, and Bonn, and Berlin, by nearly two hundred years.

When this College was founded, two of the main forces of the
intellectual world of our time had scarcely come into play,--modern
literature and modern science. Science knew nothing as yet of chemistry,
nothing of electricity, of geology, scarce anything of botany. In
astronomy, the Copernican system was just struggling into notice, and
far from being universally received. Lord Bacon, I think, was the latest
author of note in the library bequeathe