were 'filled with
anxieties and cares, and with continuous and almost unremitting labour.'
There are on my library table at the present time three volumes, in
which three college presidents may be said to have summed up the
lifework it has been given them to do for the institutions with which
they were severally connected--Caird of Glasgow, Eliot of Harvard, and
Gilman of Johns Hopkins. The first was a massive intellect which, in the
security of a long-established university system, delighted to deal, in
a series of addresses to the Glasgow students, with such subjects as the
unity and progressiveness of the sciences, the study of history, the
study of art, and the place in human development of Erasmus and Galileo,
Bacon, Hume and Bishop Butler. The two American Presidents have lived
more in the concrete, and they have put on record their attitude to, and
their methods of dealing with, the various problems they have had to
face in the educational world in which their work has been done.
Alongside their memorial volumes I like to place a still more
unpretending collection of 'Educational Papers,' which Sir William
Dawson circulated among his friends. They mark the various stages, full
of struggle and stress at every point, of his college administration,
and they form a record of what he was able to accomplish--apart from his
work as a geologist--in the sphere of education, for the High School and
the Normal School of this city, for the schools of the province, and
above all for McGill itself, which he found in 1855 a mere college with
eighty students, and which he raised to the level of a great university
with over a thousand.

"Not even in his well-earned retirement could he permit himself to be
idle. To me, one of the most touching sights in the first year of my
arrival here, was the indomitable perseverance with which every day the
well-known figure of the old Principal would make its way, bag in hand,
across the campus to the museum he loved so well, there to work for a
time among the valuable collections which the University owes to his
zeal, industry and devotion. It was in 1841 that he published his first
scientific paper, and the activity which began then was continued down
to the Thursday in the week before his death, when some reference to the
mining industry of this country suggested to him that once more with
failing hand and wearied brain he should put pen to paper on the subject
of the 'Gold of Ophir.' And