the little world which we inhabit. Up to that time one half of the earth was still waste and void. It had been lost since the beginning of time. It was buried in that darkness which was upon the face of the deep; but the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and opened the new hemisphere to the yearning eyes of the brave Genoese and again He said Let there be Light, and there was Light.

But however you may bound the Middle Ages, America contributes nothing to the studies and discussions which await you. I have carefully examined your programme and find not the remotest allusion to the Western Hemisphere. From ocean to ocean, from the North Pole to the South, it was except for the barbaric civilization of Mexico and Peru - a trackless wilderness, whose wild inhabitants afforded no lessons for modern society, unless indeed it be for that very minute section of it, on either side of the water, the mere sportsmen - who do nothing but sport for they spent their whole lives through the entire Middle Ages in hunting, shooting, fishing and canoeing. There never was such splendid sport, although nothing ever came of it but more sport. They were indeed our leisure class, the only leisure class America ever had-dating back to an unknown antiquity, certainly before the Conquest, perhaps before the Flood. Possibly our Pilgrim and Puritan Fathers took warning from their example when they resolved to found a new civil society which should consist, like

More's Utopia, of working classes only, and established the Commonwealth on the gospel of hard work, as it continues to this day. And so, perhaps, after all, America in the Middle Ages has contributed something to the sources of modern history.

I will therefore, if you will allow me, confine myself to the very modest endeavor to give you a mere glimpse of Education, of Universities, and University Extension in America, which may suggest to you their relation to the same great things in this country, without exposing me to the peril of commenting at all upon matters purely domestic here. A breeze from the West may sometimes be at least refreshing.

For 130 years from the great Discovery, while England was advancing by leaps and bounds, while Erasmus and Colet and More were doing their momentous work for the revival of learning in England, while Elizabeth's marvellous reign was perfecting the English language and literature, culminating in Shakespeare and Baconthe whole Western Hemisphere remained undisturbed and undeveloped, except as the boundless enterprise and ambition of Spain invaded its tropical regions, and the energetic rivalry of Jacques Cartier and his successors led them to explore the St. Lawrence as the Pioneers of New France.

The first great act of the English Colonists after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth in 1620, and the more important Puritan Emigration under Endicott and Winthrop in

1628-9, was the first and a very signal example of University Extension - the foundation of Harvard College as a nursery of godly ministers for the service of the Colonies. The new College was the direct child of Cambridge: the leaders of the Colony were Cambridge men, with a very little Oxford leaven, and John Harvard, born in Southwark, and baptized in St. Saviour's Church, who gave his name, his library, and the half of his fortune to the new foundation, was a graduate of Emmanuel, the distinctly Puritan College at Cambridge. Its nurture and discipline were all drawn from Cambridge sources, and for the first few decades it was a small counterpart, but in extreme poverty and littleness, of one of the Colleges of the ancient University from which it sprang.

While the Colonies still formed an integral part of the British Empire, eight more Colleges were founded after the same type, of which Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia, still maintain their ascendancy. As their limited and very scanty endowments would permit, these all followed the English types exemplified in Oxford and Cambridge. They rendered great service to the Colonies and the Empire by training men, according to the approved classical and scholastic model, for the learned professions and for public life, and adequately answered the very moderate demands of the community for higher education.

It was nearly two centuries from the foundation of Harvard in 1636, before the inadequacy

of the Universities to supply the intellectual needs of the world, and to lead its advancing movements, was suspected, and another generation still before it was fully found out and exposed. So long as they were only expected to furnish for the service of the nation the necessary supply of lawyers, doctors and ministers, of teachers, scholars and public men, and to lead and promote the growth of its literature, the old routine, the old curriculum of the Colleges and Universities embracing Latin, Greek and Mathematics, with a little philosophy, metaphysics and history, were supposed to constitute the essential elements of the higher education which had sufficed for many generations.

But a new era was at hand. Probably there never has been such a revolution in social and civil life, as was produced by the application of steam and electricity to the practical use and service of man, which began in the lifetime of men standing here to-night, and ushered in an epoch of material development and progress such as the world never witnessed before, and which has by no means reached its culmination yet. The growth of the population of the United States from ten millions to eighty millions, the reduction of a virgin Continent to their use, the creation of a vast system of transportation by railroads that occupied every corner and reached every town in the country, the adaptation of all the applied arts to the construction, equipment and decoration of public and private buildings, the rapid advance

of science, the multiplication of inventions, the unparalleled growth of manufactures, and the consequent extension of commerce and trade, — all combined to create a new and enlarged civilization, which had outgrown the old Colleges and Universities, and threatened to leave them out, or at any rate far behind. This rapid and unbounded material and intellectual progress demanded and employed an amount and variety of education and brain power, which neither their numbers, their resources, or their system of training enabled the old Universities to furnish. Probably a very small proportion of this mighty work, which characterized and marked the 19th Century, had been done or devised by the graduates of our old institutions of learning. While they had been filling the professions, the halls of legislation, the great public offices, the chairs of the teachers and men of letters, the nation had looked for and found a great army of men of brains and men of action to attend to its construction, its transportation, its manufactures, its commerce, and business of every kind.

It was found then that our higher education must be adapted to this startling and violent change in our national life, and that if our Colleges and Universities would hold their own, they must greatly increase their numbers, change their methods, and assume new and closer relations with the people whom they still aspired to instruct and lead.

In the first place their numbers were multiplied.