of a period when the College was small and restricted, to name a Princeton peacemaker, George Gray (1859), for many years United States senator from Delaware, member of the Joint High Commission at Quebec in 1898, of the Peace Commission at Paris in 1898, and of the Permanent Court of International Arbitration since 1900, chairman of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission of 1902, and a member of the Fisheries Arbitration Tribunal of 1910.

THE TRANSITION PERIOD

Inauguration of President McCosh. The Response. New Buildings. Introduction of the Elective System. Beginnings of the University Spirit. Organization of Graduate Instruction. Higher Degrees. Fellows. Science. Faculty Growth. The Bachelor of Architecture. The Bachelor of Divinity. Discipline. The Fraternities. Extra-Curriculum Activities. McCosh and the University.

THREE documentary sources tell the story of President McCosh's administration. His inaugural contains his plans; the twenty annual catalogues issued during his presidency form a continuous record of his achievement; and his valedictory in 1888 is a summary of his administration.1 Aside from the material reconstruction that he effected,-the buildings and equipment he secured, the course of study he developed, and the faculty he gathered about him, all of which is recorded in the catalogues of his day and briefly touched upon in his valedictory,his greatest work for the College was the intellectual awakening he brought about through his personal influence on the students who during twenty years came in daily contact with him in his study, in his classroom, or on the campus of what he was wont to call my college." Dr. McCosh was a great teacher, the last of the teaching presidents in the larger colleges, and in his

'Dr. McCosh's account of his administration is most conveniently found in the later chapters of Professor William M. Sloane's "Life of James McCosh-a record chiefly autobiographical" (New York, 1896), to which the reader is directed for an illuminating survey of the president's career and a discriminating estimate of his character, personality, and works.

teaching,-its clarity, its enthusiasm, its elemental common sense, and especially in its permanence,-lay his chief power. Whether or not it shall be said of him hereafter, as he wished it might, that he aided in founding an American philosophy is a question not within the province of these pages to consider further than to note the present tendency to count him rather as an educator and administrator than as a constructive philosopher. He gave the whole force of his approval to the philosophical position Princeton had occupied since Witherspoon's day, but at the same time he lifted philosophical studies at Princeton out of the formalism into which they had fallen and made them inspiring and vividly real.

Dr. Witherspoon on his arrival at Princeton had ousted Berkleyan idealism and implanted Scottish realism. Dr. McCosh, likewise, immediately found himself forced into controversy, but the cause he defended was not the conservative one. He reached America in the heat of the Darwinian discussion, and in the preface to his Bedell Lectures for 1887 on "The Religious Aspect of Evolution " he has told how, in 1868, he pondered on shipboard whether he should openly and at once avow his receptive attitude toward Darwinism or should keep his convictions to himself because of the prejudice of religious men in America. Naturally Dr. McCosh decided that avowal was the honest course and he says that he had not been a week in Princeton before he let his upperclassmen know that he looked with favor on the theory of evolution properly limited and explained. The Princeton attitude of conservatism toward the new theories was represented by the contemporary writings of Dr. Charles Hodge (1815) of the Princeton Theological Seminary and Dr. John T. Duffield (1841), professor of mathematics in the College. Against the

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position which they maintained Dr. McCosh at once took his stand. He apprehended that the undiscriminating denunciation of evolution in pulpits, periodicals, and seminaries might drive some thoughtful young men to infidelity as they clearly saw development everywhere in nature and were at the same time told by their advisers that they could not believe in evolution and yet be Christians. His orthodoxy was impugned and his teaching ridiculed but he clung to his position that, being a scientific and not a theological question, evolution should not be made a test of religious belief, and that in any case it was not necessarily opposed to theological conclusions. And he was gratified later to find that he was thanked by his pupils because, in showing them evolution in nature, he had showed that this was not inconsistent with religion.1 President Andrew D. White has summed up Dr. McCosh's influence in the matter: "With him began the inevitable compromise, and in spite of mutterings against him as a Darwinian he carried the day. Whatever may be thought of his general system of philosophy, no one can deny his great service in neutralizing the teachings of his predecessors and colleagues." 2

He came to Princeton, as he himself frankly admitted, at a propitious time. The College was waiting to be shaken into new life. Fortune favored him with physical gifts that paralleled his intellectual powers-splendid physique, noble countenance, and a voice whose tones when he was roused matched an unforgettable presence. These all helped to make well-nigh impossible any failure in the task of saving Princeton from remaining a small and average American college with a respectable an

1 Bedell Lectures, 1887, p. xi.

"History of the Warfare of Science with Theology," New York, 1905, Vol. I, p. 80.

cestry. Measured by what he did for her materially and intellectually no other president has been so great, not even Witherspoon, who was far more of a national character and whose life-work was richer and more various, but whose academic plans were checked by ill fortune. The curious parallelisms first pointed out by Dean West between the lives of McCosh and Witherspoon have been frequently quoted; each a Lowland Scotsman by birth; each educated at the University of Edinburgh, becoming a minister of the Church of Scotland at a crisis in its history and an important figure in that crisis, Witherspoon as leader of the opposition to Moderatism, McCosh as a founder of the Free Church; Witherspoon coming to Princeton in 1768, McCosh in 1868, each to spend the last twenty-six years of his life here, the one dying on November 15, 1794, and the other on November 16, 1894. And, to complete the coincidence, on the platform at Dr. McCosh's inauguration, as if to bring him, through some pretty whim of fortune, the benison of his great predecessor, there sat two of Witherspoon's own pupils, Elbert Herring and Joseph Warren Scott of the class of 1795.

No biographer of any of the men who took part in the reconstruction of American higher education after the close of the Civil War could fail to point out the signs of the time, and in his life of President McCosh, Professor Sloane has summed up the educational conditions in the country when President Maclean resigned. Public attention was turning to the development not only of the nation's natural but also of its educational resources. The era of great educational enterprise was dawning. Vast sums of money were to be given to the cause. Barnard, Eliot, Woolsey had already begun their work at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale; and Gilman was