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efforts of Benjamin Franklin and others at Philadelphia in 1749. This was at first the Academy of Philadelphia, which was superimposed upon an endowment for a Charity School made some nine years earlier. In 1755 the institution was chartered as a college, and conferred its first degrees two years later. In 1779 through a suspicion that the officials of the College were not loyal, the charter was withdrawn by the assembly and conferred upon an organization to be known as the University of the State of Pennsylvania. After a decade the College of Philadelphia was revived, and in 1791 they were merged under the name of the University of Pennsylvania, and thus constituted a real state university for Pennsylvania, although never receiving full support from the commonwealth. The view now on the screen is that of the building that was given over in 1802 for the use of the amalgamated institution. This second site of the University was located where the present city post-office now stands, and before the removal of the capital of the country from Philadelphia to Washington, it had been the President's mansion. Some years before this, the institution had developed Departments of both Medicine (1765) and Law (1790), and thus become, as we have seen, the first genuine university according to the American use of the

term.

A little later than this, there was founded in the city of New York the institution known as King's College. In 1787 the name was changed to Columbia College in honor of our independence, and more than a century later it became Columbia University, now the largest and wealthiest institution of higher learning in the world. It still possesses the crown which surmounted the dome of the early building, but it expects never to have any active use for it, especially as the recent events that have so cemented our fractured relations with the Mother Country, have made anything save democracy unpopular. Columbia is now located upon Morningside Heights, its third site, and has during the past generation become a real cosmopolitan center.

The beginning of a new era in universities and public educa

tion was ushered in through the opening of the University of Virginia in 1825. An ideal drawing of the plant by its founder, Thomas Jefferson, is still in existence. It represents a radical modification of the semi-monastic idea of the "colleges," which characterized the early universities of Europe and was inherited by most colonial institutions in America. A building in the center of the picture was intended for lectures and recitations, while some on the sides were meant as residences for the professors, and the smaller buildings were planned for the students. Jefferson expected to have the university as a capstone of a great system, which he formulated in a bill introduced into the legislature as early as 1779. While this plan was never fully carried out, it seems to have led to "permissive" laws for public education and a state school fund, and the university was erected largely in accordance with Jefferson's drawing.

Since the day of the great Virginian, higher education has been remarkably extended and democratized. There are now almost seven hundred colleges and universities in the United States, and all parts of the country seem well supplied. In fact, they are so numerous that an unseemly competition for students is often apparent, and institutions of higher learning, instead of holding their courses to be a special privilege, occasionally offer substantial material inducements to attract students into the fold. Nevertheless, the opportunities open everywhere have had the effect of greatly raising the general level of education. State universities, with little or no charge for tuition, have arisen in each commonwealth west of the Alleghenies, throughout the South, and even in a few Eastern states. A present-day view of the University of Michigan, which was the first prominent institution of this sort to develop, will show that the plant of the large state universities is quite on a par with that of the oldest private institutions of the East, and as much may be said of the strength of their staff and educational facilities. In a few large cities, like New York, strong municipal colleges, as free as the high schools, supplement the work of the state universities, and both of these types of institutions are destined to increase in the near future.

Moreover, even the old-time denominational institution has largely become nonsectarian, although many of them did not suspect that they had broadened until the Carnegie retiring allowance required this as one of its conditions for admission. Then their acrobatics in bursting denominational bonds and leaping to the band-wagon were not exactly dignified, but demonstrated what a real change had taken place. Occasionally there have sprung up new nonsectarian universities, like that of Leland Stanford, without either state, city, or denominational allegiance.

One of the most striking improvements in American universities of the present appears in the facilities now afforded by their professional schools, which have developed from the medieval faculties of law, medicine, and theology. Originally departments within the college, they have now expanded into separate schools, and handsome and appropriate structures have been erected for them, like the law school building of the University of Pennsylvania in the appropriate style of the English Renaissance or the extensive and elaborate group of medical buildings belonging to Harvard. New professional schools have also sprung into existence as new demands have arisen, as instanced by the School of Dentistry of the University of Pennsylvania, with its Collegiate Gothic architecture. Endeavors have likewise been made to create university schools for the training of teachers. For more than half a century we have believed it necessary to train our teachers for the elementary schools, and of late years we have begun to suspect that it might be well for high school instructors to know how to teach. To meet this new need, colleges and universities have added instruction in Education. This was first an appendage to the chair of Philosophy, but rapidly expanded until the work included five or ten professorships, and in many instances has been organized into a School of Education. The greatest of these institutions, Teachers College at Columbia University, is known to have an independent budget of more than a million dollars per annum.

There has also been a general development of efficiency and

beauty in all parts of the grounds and buildings of the modern American university. This is illustrated by that most attractive group of buildings modelled after the English colleges, known as Hutchinson Court at the University of Chicago, or the splendid group of structures in the spirit of the Collegiate Gothic that serve as dormitories for the men of Pennsylvania. As one gazes at such vistas as that presented from the Triangle to the Provost's Tower on the main Quadrangle, he not only finds complete satisfaction in the vision, but is objectively reminded of the interesting past of our universities. Should his vagrant eye then turn to other portions of the campus, it will bear witness to the strenuous activities of university life during the recent struggle for freedom, carried even to the supreme sacrifice, as marked by the everlasting memorial of Alma Mater. What of the future development of our universities? Of this no prophet yet has told, but certain we are that in the future, as in the past and present, the keynote to this evolution will be found in Liberty and the symbol of Liberty that adorns our campus at the University of Pennsylvania.

OUR STELLAR UNIVERSE: HOW WE LEARN OF ITS MASS, EXTENT AND SLOW DEVELOPMENT

BY ERIC DOOLITTLE

Flower Professor of Astronomy and Director of the
Flower Observatory

In the short time available to us this afternoon we shall endeavor to give some brief account of what, to the present time, we have learned about the great universe of stars around us; of its extent and total mass, and particularly of the form into which it is probably changing. We shall call especial attention to those much smaller universes, the globular or spherical clusters, which have proceeded much farther in their development than our larger universe has, and which have of late especially attracted the attention of astronomers as one interesting and surprising fact about them after another has been brought to light. And, lastly, we shall tell very briefly of what is known and what is inferred regarding the spiral nebulas, those strange, far distant objects, each of which some astronomers believe is a universe of stars, more or less closely resembling our own. It is true, especially in the very latest investigations, that exact and definite results cannot yet be arrived at; we can only state what conclusions the evidence before us seems to render the most probable ones; exact knowledge of the history of our universe still lies in the future.

We know that we are immersed in a great cloud of suns which surrounds us on every side, and of which our own sun is a part. Perhaps the clearest image of this great cloud, or Milky Way universe, may be obtained by comparing it to a large cloud of dust. Corresponding to each dust particle of the small cloud there is a star in the great one, and the distances between these suns are very great compared with the size of the suns themselves. As with the particles of dust in the dust cloud, the stars are not at all uniformly distributed among themselves. In some

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