then existed. Such a foundation would merely be a duplication of work
already well done elsewhere and therefore a waste of money and effort.
He proposed that this large endowment should be used, not for the
erection of expensive architecture, but primarily for seeking out, in
all parts of the world, the best professorial brains in certain approved
branches of learning. In the same spirit he suggested that a similarly
selective process be adopted in the choice of students: that only those
American boys who had displayed exceptional promise should be admitted
and that part of the university funds should be used to pay the expenses
of twenty young men who, in undergraduate work at other colleges, stood
head and shoulders above their contemporaries. The bringing together of
these two sets of brains for graduate study would constitute the new
university. A few rooms in the nearest dwelling house would suffice for
headquarters. Dr. Gilman's scheme was approved; he became President on
these terms; he gathered his faculty not only in the United States but
in England, and he collected his first body of students, especially his
first twenty fellows, with the same minute care.

It seems almost a miracle that an inexperienced youth in a little
Methodist college in Virginia should have been chosen as one of these
first twenty fellows, and it is a sufficient tribute to the impression
that Page must have made upon all who met him that he should have won
this great academic distinction. He was only twenty-one at the time--the
youngest of a group nearly every member of which became distinguished in
after life. He won a Fellowship in Greek. This in itself was a great
good fortune; even greater was the fact that his new life brought him
into immediate contact with a scholar of great genius and lovableness.
Someone has said that America has produced four scholars of the very
first rank--Agassiz in natural science, Whitney in philology, Willard
Gibbs in physics, and Gildersleeve in Greek. It was the last of these