ns, Instructors
and "Instructrixes" throughout the various counties, cities, towns,
townships, or other geographical divisions of Michigan.

To support this grand scheme, the public taxes were to be increased
fifteen percent, and a provision, which seems strangely unacademic to
the college community of a century later, was made for four successive
lotteries from which the Catholepistemiad might retain fifteen percent
of the prizes for its own use. Two of these lotteries apparently were
drawn.

The institution which arose in the shade of this immense growth of
pseudo-classical verbiage was a very modest undertaking indeed and
developed little beyond the primary school and classical academy first
established. These were housed in a little building in Detroit,
twenty-four by fifty feet, on the west side of Bates Street near
Congress, afterward occupied by one of the branches of the University.
Scarcely more ambitious was the faculty of two men, the Rev. John
Monteith, a Presbyterian clergyman who was President and seven-fold
_didactor_, and Father Gabriel Richard, a Catholic priest who was
Vice-President and incumbent of the other six _didaxiim_.

[Illustration: THE CATHOLEPISTEMIAD, OR UNIVERSITY, OF MICHIGANIA
A photograph of the original outline in Judge Woodward's handwriting;
now in the University Library]

Absurd as was the terminology and ridiculous as were its vast
pretensions in view of the little French-Canadian community it served,
nevertheless, the educational scheme which the act outlined was of
great significance in the future development of education in the State.
It was one of the first plans in America for a complete educational
program to be supported by the people of a state.[1] Its sources were to
be found, undoubtedly, in the strong influence of French thought on
contemporary American life, for this scheme was but a copy of the highly
centralized organization of state instruction which Napoleon gave to
France in the Imperial University of 1806-08. As Professor Hinsdale
says, "the ponderous name belonged to organized public education." Four
years later, another act established in Detroit "an University for the
purpose of educating youth" as the successor of the Catholepistemiad,
with little change in the broad and liberal outline of the plan save in
two particulars,--a change from classical to English nomenclature and
the substitution of a Board of Trustees for the self-governing President
and Dida