world below, and his progress, moral and religious, toward the Heaven above. Condensed still more briefly, under the generic heads of classics, science, and theology, I only claim, that every wisely managed College will unite them all in due proportion.

It is the distinguishing characteristic of this venerable institution, now foremost among the first of American Colleges,' that from her very foundation, nearly one hundred and seventy years ago, she has commingled these three cardinal elements of educational culture, with nice and skilful hand. Especially is it true in respect to the contending claims of science and letters, which she has ever kept in just and harmonious equilibrium; wisely using the strength of the one to invigorate the elegance of the other, and, in its turn, adorning the vigor of science with the grace and polish of classic culture. Her earliest teachings in the very infancy of our colonial history, received their tone and flavor from BERKELEY, Dean of Derry, and afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, eminent alike as a philosopher and a lover of letters,— the income of whose well-timed and judicious endowment, gratefully recognized for a century and a half as "The Dean's Bounty," annually rewards the successful competitor in the language and literature of Greece and Rome. The germ thus wisely planted, has borne its precious fruits, in the long line of classical scholars, coming down through her early and learned Presidents and Professors to their honored successors, who now grace this assembly with their presence. It probably has not chilled the ardor of the young aspirants for the prize to know, that BERKELEY had been enabled to make this endow

1 The competition of YALE and HARVARD is very close. The triennial catalogues of the two institutions show, that in the 162 years from the first "Commencement" of YALE, she passed 7,116 academical students to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. During the same period, HARVARD passed 6,973. The number graduated by the two Colleges in 1862, was precisely the same, being 96 in each.

ment, by a legacy of what CHARLES LAMB calls "a trifle of four thousand pounds," lovingly bequeathed to him by the wellknown Hester Vanhomrigh, the "Vanessa" of SWIFT, whose ardent but scantily requited passion for that eminent but very surly ecclesiastic, has made her name immortal. May we not trace even to this remote and romantic source, the lively perception by some of our accomplished graduates, of the peculiar beauties of Catullus and Anacreon?

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In cultivating the taste for polite learning, the College has not lost sight of the proper claims of mathematical and physical science, still less of sound theology; all of which she has kept in wise conjunction. She has manifested her wis dom especially in disregarding or reconciling those imaginary antagonisms between the two great Revelations of the Divine Being in His Word and in His Works, which have caused such unnecessary alarm in other quarters.

It is a noteworthy circumstance, that the College came into being just as the morning was breaking on that long and dismal night, in which ecclesiastical ambition had arrogantly assumed not only to regulate the political affairs of Christendom, but to establish authoritatively the history and the material laws of the creation. Not content with fanatically burning the written treasures of the classic ages of antiquity, it had practically banished physical science from Christian Europe, to find refuge and protection, for several centuries, under the more liberal rule of the Saracen Caliphs. In this deep and memorable eclipse, the great truths of astronomy, of mathematics, of medicine, with prophetic glimpses even of geology, for want of Christian students on the Thames, the Seine, and the Tiber, were uttered to Mahomedan ears on the Tigris, the Euphrates,

2 Mr. CHARLES ASTOR BRISTED was a successful competitor in 1839 for "The Dean's Bounty." He has since published an American edition of Catullus, with interesting and valuable notes.

and the Nile. Every attempt in Christendom, by the votaries of enlightened science, to pierce the gloom, was repaid by the prison or the faggot. As late as 1543, near the middle of the sixteenth century, and more than fifty years after Columbus had reached America, COPERNICUS was excommunicated by the Church of Rome for the deadly offence of asserting the sun to be the centre of the solar system; while half a century later, BRUNO, who ventured to avow the same belief with other heresies, was burned at the stake.

In 1642, the aged GALILEO, whose newly invented telescope had summoned down to earth the satellites of Jupiter, as witnesses to verify the heliocentric theory of COPERNICUS, after being compelled by torture to assert the immobility of the earth, was confined for the residue of his life in the prisons of the Inquisition; while the ancient Ptolemaic, or geocentric theory, with the earth for the centre, entangled in a complicated and incoherent web of cycles and epicycles, was announced by Papal authority as a dogma of scriptural truth, with fire, and flame and death, as the penalty for unbelief. It is a little refreshing to know that Alphonso the Tenth, the king of Catholic Castile, had ventured, two centuries before, to creep out of this darkness far enough to earnestly assert, though with a tinge of irreverence, that if the creation of the world had been left to him, he would have had no cycles or epicycles; but the general mind of Christendom remained in manacles until emancipated by the transcendent genius of NEWTON.

By a providential compensation, that illustrious mathematician came into the world in the very year in which GALILEO left it, bringing with him the mighty engine of the calculus, measuring all the perturbations, and unravelling all the intricacies of the celestial system, and correcting any minor errors of COPERNICUS. The immortal" Principia" were first published in 1687, preceding, by less than twenty years, the foundation of Yale Col

lege. The fact is strange and curious, that even here in emancipated America, the Ptolemaic or geocentric theory, enforced by Papal assumption upon the dark ages, was actually taught for several years, within these very walls. It was not until 1718, that the light of the heliocentric system was first let in, through the efforts of the clear-sighted Doctor SAMUEL JOHNSON, then a Tutor in the College, and who in due season would have become its President, but for his ill-timed doubts of the validity of Presbyterian ordination. A copy of the "Principia," sent out from Europe, had reached the little college library, upon which the youthful JOHNSON entered with great avidity, after studying the higher mathematics for the purpose. "Till then," says his biographer, "the Ptolemaic system of the world was as strongly "believed as the Holy Scriptures; but JOHNSON was soon able

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to overthrow it, and establish on its ruins the doctrine of "COPERNICUS." The heliocentric system at once illuminated the College, and here it'will continue to pour forth its magnificent light until the College, and the Earth, and the Sun, and the Stars, shall be no more. Poor old COPERNICUS, who in his dying hours had sought, by a letter of dedication, to disarm the opposition of the Pope, was lying in his grave on the Baltic, carefully covered by the Papal excommunication, which was not formally annulled by the Vatican until the year 1821, seven years after our Class left college. Since that time, the Church of Rome, claiming to be the chosen keeper and interpreter of Holy Writ, together with the residue of the Christian world, have permitted the students of the Pentateuch to read the Genesis, by the light of COPERNICUS and NEWTON.

It will be gratifying and comforting to know that our Class of 1814, since it left these walls, has been faithfully carried fifty times around the centre of the solar system thus established, punctually coming, as in College, and especially at morning prayers, we did not always punctually come, "up to time".

2

and further, that the sun himself, with his whole cortège of planets and other minor attendants, has been carefully and safely running his appointed course through the vast abyss of stellar space, at the comparatively dignified pace of 400,000 miles a day, steadily "making," in nautical phrase, for a point in the constellation Hercules. Within this celestial period, the mathematicians of the College have not been idle; although for want of that enlarged Astronomical Observatory, which the alumni now and here assembled expressly admit and declare that they owe the College,-its astronomers have not been able, by their own visual organs, to fathom all the depths of the heavens. But they have vigilantly and faithfully followed in the wake of the actual observers. They have carefully chronicled the birth of the numerous family of Asteroids, now nearly eighty strong, exhausting in their baptism nearly all the names in the classic mythology, and throwing quite in the shade that modest little group, that partie carrée, of Juno, Vesta, Pallas, and Ceres, whom we knew in College. They profoundly participated in the sublime emotion kindled in the scientific world by the recent discovery of Neptune, pursuing his remote and lonely voyage along the outer circle of planetary space, and the conse quent addition of more than two thousand millions of miles to the pre-existing estimate of the diameter of the solar system. But more especially has it been theirs, to share still more largely and almost exclusively, in the labor and in the honor of the bril liant exploring expeditions in the great Archipelago of the meteoric world. They have virtually monopolized the fiery showers with which the earth is periodically greeted. One of their number, who happily, and not unworthily, bears the name of NEWTON, has just given to the world an acute and learned memoir, reaching back through the Arabian to the more ancient histories of the heavens, in which he demonstrates the orbit of this meteoric group, and its mathemati