with mental activity, places consecrated to the most earnest and independent inquiry.

IV. there is one more feature which will, I trust, always characterize the influence sent forth from Franklin and Marshall College. An institution bearing such a name would be recreant to all the promises its name implies, if it did not encourage public spirit and a large-hearted sympathy with humanity in all its forms and interests. Franklin began every day by asking himself, "What good can I do to my fellow men to-day?" he closed it by asking, "What good that I might have done to my fellow men to-day, have I left undone?" He who lived by such a rule could not be less than the benefactor of all men. He came to Philadelphia a poor apprentice boy. He lived to found its great Library, its Philosophical Society, its University, with many provisions for its material prosperity. He lived to be the almost idolized citizen of his adopted town and State, and the profoundly honored and trusted sage of the whole land. Yet never, when wearing his highest honors, did he forget the humble origin from which he sprang; never did his heart fail to beat with kindness and consideration towards all who needed his succor or his counsel. And John Marshall, too, how kindly and genial was his spirit? How free from arrogance! Be this the spirit that shall ever reign here. Not our Pennsylvania Germans alone, many others have dreaded colleges as nurseries of a silly aristocratic pride as places where young men, coming from plain but respectable and worthy homes, would learn to despise them; as schools where they would be taught to put scorn upon the institutions of their country or the demands of their age. The gentleman who preceded me has adverted to these impressions. Erroneous as they are, they have continued to live because the follies of young men, and the mistakes of their teachers, have sometimes given countenance to them. Colleges in our land, like Universities in England, have sometimes been slow to feel the progress of society. They have fallen back upon their privileges; they have cultivated too little sympathy with the public mind which it is their office to guide and instruct. They have asked the people to sustain and cherish them; but they have sometimes forgotten that "love is the loan for love." They would have the masses feel great interest in the colleges, but they do not always think it necessary that the colleges should care much for the masses.

Here, we trust, is an institution where such a spirit will be unknown. If there are men who, more than all others, should have pulses throbbing with a large humanity, with a generous patriotism; it is they who are in contact with the fountains of thought, and whose business it is to trace the history of our race in its literature, and in all its strug

gles for a fairer and happier lot. Let teachers and pupils emulate each other in love for their kind, and in quick sympathy for every effort which would promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Let them honor that which is most worthy of honor; and when they go out to mingle with the sons of toil, let them put no slights upon it. Let them own its intrinsic dignity; let them strive that it may be associated with a higher culture; let them so bear themselves that it shall be seen that a college is the true home for large minds and large hearts for spirits that are enlightened and refined enough for the highest, and kindly and courteous enough for the lowliest in the land.

V. I cannot conclude without expressing my devout hope that this college may be administered in the spirit of faith. "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." Aim, friends, at great things. Doubt not, that if true to yourselves, God will empower you to do great things for yourselves and for mankind. Lancaster has her model farms and her model mills: why should she not have her model college? not one where there shall be many students badly taught and badly governed; but where there shall be at least a few so taught and so guided that they shall be model students here and model men abroad. Young men, who form the first classes in Franklin and Marshall College, be models of diligence-be models of selfrespect-be models of scholar-like enthusiasm. You shall thus kindle a spirit here which will burn on steadily from class to class, and which will make you benefactors to this college, and to your successors, beyond the bounds of your utmost ambition. Gentlemen of the Faculty! let nil desperandum be your motto. Never despair of your pupils, of your Trustees, of yourselves. Let no obstacles dishearten, no failures weary. Be enthusiastic students, that you may be attractive and powerful teachers. Be vigilant, but loving and longsuffering disciplinarians, that you may knit these young hearts to you as with hooks of steel. And, gentlemen of the Board of Trustees, doubt not that, with a liberal steady policy, with unyielding enthusiasm, you shall find your fondest hopes and wishes realized. Cherish this seat of letters, this home of liberal arts; endow it largely with all means of instruction. Let its libraries, its museum, its halls of apparatus, teem with appliances for the best teaching and the best illustrations. As individuals, imitate the noble benefactions which men of successful enterprise in New England think it a privilege to bestow upon their seminaries of learning; and do not permit yourselves to close you eyes on life, without having left behind you here some honorable memorial of your zeal in hehalf of Religion and of Learning.

ALONZO POTTER, D. D., LL. D.

RT. REV. ALONZO POTTER, D. D., the first President of the American Association for the Advancement of Education, was born of parents who were of Rhode Island, in Beekman, (now La Grange,) in Duchess County, New York, July 10th 1800, and died in San Francisco, California, July 4th, 1865. After attending the common school of his town till he was fourteen years old, he enjoyed the advantages of a classical and mathematical training for college, in the academy at Poughkeepsie, then under the charge of Daniel S. Barnes, who was afterward associated with Dr. Griscom in the Public High School of the City of New York. He graduated in 1818, at Union College, the first scholar in a class which included many men who afterward became eminent.

He commenced teaching immediately after graduating, in Philadelphia, and in the following year was called to Union College as tutor, where he became, in 1321, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, which Chair he filled till 1826, when he became Rector of St. Paul's Church, in Boston, but returned to Schenectady in 1831, on the urgent solicitation of his father-in-law, Dr. Nott, to become Vice President and Professor of Moral Philosophy in Union College, which positions he filled till 1845, when he was elected Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania. As a college officer and teacher, he has had no superior for thorough instruction, and the power of cultivating lofty aspirations and a manly character in his pupils; and while doing his whole duty as a college officer and teacher, and as Rector and Bishop, no man in his day and place did more to promote the cause of popular education and religious philanthropy. He was the adviser of James Wadsworth of Geneva, in his voluntary labors, and pecuniary contributions, and of the School Department at Albany in its official action, and of the friends of popular education, in all efforts to establish School Libraries, Educational Periodicals, County Supervision, State Normal Schools, and to elevate and inform public sentiment on the whole subject of Educational Improvement. His wise counsel and earnest appeals were sure to be heard in all County, State, and National School Conventions, up to the day that his own nervous system broke down beneath his manifold labors. The Hospital, the Divinity School, the Literary and Lecture Associations of Philadelphia, and every department of education in Pennsylvania felt the impulse of his earnest spirit. The School for Imbeciles at Media was a charity of his suggestion and efforts.

On the outbreak of the rebellion, Bishop Potter took a decided stand on the side of the National Government, was an active member of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, and an earnest friend of Emancipation-devoting much time to the hospitals of invalid and wounded soldiers, until his vital powers were exhausted, when he took a voyage to the Pacific, but died before he could be taken to the land.

Bishop Potter was the author of "The Principles of Science applied to the Domestic and Mechanic Arts," "Political Economy, its Objects, Uses and Principles," and a "Hand Book for Readers and Students"—all published in Harpers' District School Library, which was got up under his supervision. "The School," the first part of the "School and Schoolmaster," was prepared by him at the request of Mr. Wadsworth, and had a circulation of over 60,000 copies. He received the degree of D. D. from Harvard College, and of LL. D. from Union College.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS FIFTY YEARS AGO.

It was, as I have said, sir, fifty-two years last April since I began, at the age of nine years, to attend the reading and writing schools in North Bennett street. The reading school was under Master Little (for "Young America" had not yet repudiated that title), and the writing school was kept by Master Tileston. Master Little, in spite of his name, was a giant in stature, six feet four, at least, and somewhat wedded to the past. He struggled earnestly against the change then taking place in the pronunciation of u, and insisted on our saying monooment and natur. But I acquired, under his tuition, what was thought in those days a very tolerable knowledge of Lindley Murray's abridgment of English Grammar, and at the end of the year could parse almost any sentence in the American Preceptor. Master Tileston was a writing-master of the old school. He set the copies himself, and taught that beautiful old Boston handwriting, which, if I do not mistake, has in the march of innovation (which is not always the same thing as improvement) been changed very little for the better. Master Tileston was advanced in years, and had found a qualification for his calling as a writing-master, in what might have seemed at first to threaten to be an obstruction. The fingers of his right hand had been contracted and stiffened in early life by a burn, but were fixed in just the position to hold a pen, a penknife, and a rattan ! As they were also considerably indurated, they served as a convenient instrument of discipline. A copy badly written or a blotted page was sometimes visited with an infliction which would have done no discredit to the beak of a bald eagle. I speak, sir, from observation not from experience. His long, deep desk was a perfect curiosity-shop of confiscated balls, tops, penknives, marbles, and jewsharps; the accumulation of forty years. I desire, however, to speak of him with gratitude, for he put me on the track of an acquisition which has been extremely useful to me in after life, that of a plain, legible hand. I remained at these schools about sixteen months, and, on leaving them, had the good fortune in 1804 to receive the Franklin medal in the English department.

After an interval of about a year (during which I attended a private school taught by Mr. Ezekiel Webster, a distinguished gentleman of New Hampshire, and, on occasion of his absence, by his much more distinguished and ever memorable brother, Daniel Webster, at that time a student of law in Boston), I went to the Latin School, then slowly emerging from a state of extreme depression. It was kept in School-street, where the Horticultural Hall now stands. Those who judge of what the Boston Latin School ought to be from the spacious and commodious building in Bedford-street, can form but little idea of the old school-house. It contained but one room, heated in the winter by an iron stove, which sent up a funnel into a curious brick chimney, built down from the roof, in the middle of the room, to within seven or eight feet from the floor, being, like Mahomet's coffin, held in the air to the roof I hardly know how, perhaps by bars of iron. The boys had to take their turns in winter in coming early to the school-house, to open it; to make a fire sometimes of wet logs and a very inadequate supply of other combustibles, if such they might be called; to sweep out the room, and, if need be, to shovel a path through the snow to the street. These were not very fascinating duties for an urchin of ten or eleven; but we lived through it, and were perhaps not the worse for having to turn our hand to these little offices.

The standard of scholastic attainment was certainly not higher than that of material comfort in those days. We read pretty much the same books, or books of the same class, in Latin and Greek, as are read now, with the exception of the Greek Testament; but we read them in a very cursory and superficial manner. There was no attention paid to the philosophy of the languages, to the deduction of words from their radical elements, to the niceties of construction, still less to prosody. I never made an hexameter or pentameter verse, till years afterwards, when I had a son at school in London, who occasionally required a little aid in that way. The subsidiary and illustrative branches were wholly unknown in the Latin School in 1805. Such a thing as a school library, a book of reference, a critical edition of a classic, a map, a blackboard, an engraving of an ancient building, or a copy of a work of ancient art, such as now adorn the walls of our schools, was as little known as

the electric telegraph. If our children, who possess all these appliances and aids to learning, do not greatly excel their parents, they will be much to blame.

COLLEGE LIFE FIFTY YEARS AGO.

But, short as the time is since I entered college (only half as long as that which has elapsed since the close of the seven years' war), it has made me the witness of wonderful changes, both materially and intellectually, in all that concerns our Alma Mater. Let me sketch you the outlines of the picture, fresh to my mind's eye as the image in the camera, which the precincts of the college exhibited in 1807. The Common was then uninclosed. It was not so much traversed by roads in all directions; it was at once all road and no road at all,—a waste of mud and of dust, according to the season, without grass, trees, or fences. As to the streets in those days, the "Appian Way" existed then as now; and I must allow that it bore the same resemblance then as now to the Regina Viarum, by which the consuls and proconsuls of Rome went forth to the conquest of Epirus, Macedonia, and the East.

As to public buildings in the neighborhood of the University, with the exception of the Episcopal Church, no one of the churches now standing was then in existence. The old parish church has disappeared, with its square pews, and galleries from which you might almost jump into the pulpit. It occupied a portion of the space between Dane Hall and the old Presidential House. I planted a row of elm and oak trees a few years ago on the spot where it stood, for which, if for nothing else, I hope to be kindly remembered by posterity. The wooden building now used as a gymnasium, and, I believe, for some other purposes, then stood where Lyceum Hall now stands. It was the county courthouse; and there I often heard the voice of the venerable Chief Justice Parsons. Graduates' Hall did not exist; but on a part of the site, and behind the beautiful linden trees still flourishing, was an old black wooden house, the residence of the professors of mathematics. A little further to the north, and just at the corner of Church-street, which was not then opened, stood what was dignified in the annual college catalogue (which was printed on one side of a sheet of paper, and was a novelty) as " The College House." The cellar is still visible. By the students this edifice was disrespectfully called “ Wiswall's Den," or, for brevity, "the Den." I lived in it in my freshman year. Whence the name of "Wiswall's Den" was derived, I hardly dare say there was something worse than "old fogy" about it. There was a dismal tradition that, at some former period, it had been the scene of a murder. A brutal husband had dragged his wife by the hair up and down the stairs, and then killed her. On the anniversary of the murder and what day that was no one knew — there were sights and sounds-flitting garments draggled in blood, plaintive screams, stridor ferri tractæque catena — enough to appall the stoutest sophomore. But, for myself, I can truly say, that I got through my freshman year without having seen the ghost of Mr. Wiswall or his lamented lady. I was not, however, sorry when the twelvemonth was up, and I was transferred to that light, airy, well-ventilated room, No. 20 Hollis; being the inner room, ground-floor, north entry of that ancient and respectable edifice.

COMMON SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES.

The worthy chairman of the committee alluded to the University in this place; and, as he made the allusion, the thought crossed my mind to institute a comparison of the expense with which the University and the public schools of Cambridge are supported. It may enable us to realize how great an effort is made by the citizens of Cambridge to support their public schools. The annual expenditure for the support of our schools exceeds twenty thousand dollars, without including the building and repair of school-houses. Last year it was twenty-one thousand dollars. Now the University, as we all know, is by far the oldest and best endowed in the country; but the whole annual income of its funds applicable to the business of instruction (I speak of Harvard College proper, and not of the professional and scientific schools connected with the University), is less than that sum. All that the liberality of the State and