William H. Hudson, of Stanford University,--and Prof. E. P
Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of Munich,
for extensive aid in researches upon the lines I have indicated
to them, but which I could never have prosecuted without their
co-operation. In libraries at home and abroad they have all
worked for me most effectively, and I am deeply grateful to them.

This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift--a tribute to
Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-century of its
existence, and probably my last tribute.

The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its
foundation have triumphed. Its faculty, numbering over one
hundred and, fifty; its students, numbering but little short of
two thousand; its noble buildings and equipment; the munificent
gifts, now amounting to millions of dollars, which it has
received from public-spirited men and women; the evidences of
public confidence on all sides; and, above all, the adoption of
its cardinal principles and main features by various institutions
of learning in other States, show this abundantly. But there has
been a triumph far greater and wider. Everywhere among the
leading modern nations the same general tendency is seen. During
the quarter-century just past the control of public instruction,
not only in America but in the leading nations of Europe, has
passed more and more from the clergy to the laity. Not only are
the presidents of the larger universities in the United States,
with but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing is
seen in the old European strongholds of metaphysical theology.
At my first visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty years ago, they
were entirely under ecclesiastical control. Now, all this is