receiving from them almost a million francs a year. The new Opera, "le plus grand theatre de l'univers," which was opened on new year's day 1875, built at a cost of more than ten millions of dollars, is a government work. A century ago Voltaire said that France owed her comedy and her opera to two cardinals, who were prime ministers, and the latest authorities testify that national funds have made the Théâtre Francais what it is, and that without such assistance it could not retain its position. German exactions never stopped that aid. It was only for two years that they cut it down.

Another of the modes in which governments have advanced knowledge is through establishing universities.

Such institutions have sometimes proved rather cisterns to preserve than fountains yielding anything new. Yet these reservoirs have usually given a momentum to the knowledge they contain which has impelled it forward, and have not been without collateral influences.

"Thither, as to a fountain, countless stars

Repairing, in their golden urns draw light."

They pave the way for each new generation of scholars to reach more rapidly the limits of actual knowledge, and point out the quarters in which they are to push forward in order to enlarge it.

Next to the Academy at Athens founded by Plato and afterwards endowed in part by King Attalus, the earliest university on record was established by Ptolemy at Alexandria, nearly three centuries before Christ. Its faculties were three, philosophy, philology, and medicine. It included a tropical and a zöological garden. It did something for the mathematical discoveries of Euclid, and for those of Ptolemy in geography and astronomy, which have been leavening the world for two thousand years.

The institution established by Constantine in A.D. 320 at Constantinople, boasted twelve Professors, who were maintained at the public expense. Thus, in the words of Newman: "First carried forth upon the wings of genius, and dissemi

nated by the energy of individual minds or of single cities, knowledge was extended to and fro in the basin of the Mediterranean. Introduced, in course of time, to a more intimate alliance with political power, it received the means at the date of Alexander and of his successors, both of its cultivation and of its propagation. It was formally endowed under the Ptolemies, and at length became the direct object of the solicitude of the government under the Caesars." At the University of Rome in 1514, the Professors were one hundred and one. Their salaries were paid by the government. It may hence be inferred that those in similar mediaeval institutions of earlier origin were likewise so paid. Among such institutions were the University of Wittenberg, the cradle of the Reformation, founded twelve years earlier, in 1502, by a Saxon prince, with nine others in Germany still older; Oxford, where Oriel College was established by Edward II. in 1326; Bologna reckoned the oldest of all, dating from 1119, Salamanca from 1200, and Paris from 1215.

Whatever facts can be gleaned concerning the endowment of these and similar mediaeval institutions show them to have had patronage from the ruling powers. In 1050 the French king, Robert Capet, furnished board to a hundred clerks while they attended the lectures which were the seed that grew into the University of Paris. In 1365 the University of Vienna was chartered, as well as granted grounds, buildings, and exemption from taxes, by the reigning prince. In 1477 the University of Tübingen, at its foundation, was, by the favor of the pope, vouchsafed the avails of five benefices and of eight canonries. The University of Pisa being endowed by the pope with tithes, it was contended by some that Galileo, inasmuch as he was a layman, was disqualified for holding a professorship. The University of Leyden, at its foundation in 1574, was endowed by the Dutch republic, in the very darkest period of the struggle against Spain, with a handsome revenue, principally derived from the ancient abbey of Egmont. Universities never were so much encouraged by governments as at the present day. A new one

founded by Austria at Czernowitz, on her eastern frontier, was opened on the fourth of October 1875. The Prussian appropriation for the Berlin University in 1874 was 930,980 marks. (A mark is twenty-six cents.) In the same year Great Britain appropriated for her universities £52,027, and the Czar sent a donation of 25,000 rubles to that in Tomsk in Siberia. In 1875 the Berlin Federal Council voted 100,000 marks for the University of Strasburg.

In the same line with universities as nurseries of knowledge, ought to be classed special schools supported by government for imparting and increasing the best science in special departments.

Specimens of this sort are our national Naval School at Annapolis, costing $200,000 a year; West Point Academy, maintained by a much larger appropriation, $345,362 in 1874, and similar seats of science in several European states. At the head of all military academies stands the War-school at Berlin. The number of officers who can be here admitted is limited to forty a year. These students are selected after a rigid examination from a much larger number of candidates who have been seven years in preparation, and three of those years in military service. Advancing from such a starting-point what can their goal be in their specialty but the utmost limit of the attainable?

No class of men have done more to extend the bounds of human knowledge than professors in higher schools. Such names as Vesalius, Galvani, Volta, Galileo, Torricelli, De Saussure, Newton, Laplace, Berzelius, Oersted, Bopp, Boeckh, Ritter, Niebuhr, Curtius, Mommsen, will be remembered by every one, and hundreds more may be counted in biographical dictionaries. Professors, however, superannuate, die, or depart, but universities are professors who remain, never grow old, continually learn, as well as teach. They are either, as Bacon holds, " mines resounding on all sides with new works and further progress," or, at least, they are like the "tower of David builded for an armory, whereon there hung a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.”

The several States in the American Union, and foreign nations perhaps without exception, exempt from taxation the property of institutions dedicated either to the advancement or to the diffusion of knowledge. Our general government not only admits their imports free of duty, but, thanks to Agassiz! it lets all the alcohol they consume for scientific uses escape the domestic excise!

For promoting higher education the United States, previous to 1862, had patented 1,119,440 acres of land, and in that year added to its grant 9,600,000 acres for so-called agricultural colleges. The total outlay on public schools in 1874 was $74,000,000. The school lands, amounting to 62,428,413 acres of the public domain, a larger area than England, Scotland and Wales, are intended rather for the diffusion than for the increase of knowledge. But all diffusion of knowledge increases it, if not objectively, at least subjectively. If it does not add to the sum of what may be learned, it adds to the sum that is learned. Accordingly, all public outlays for schools, however primary, and all laws compelling school attendance, promote knowledge. The recent appropriations for public schools from public funds in several states have been as follows: In 1873-74 Great Britain, £1,971,692; in 1875 France, 36,683,939 francs; in 1874 Italy, 21,946,213 francs; Prussia, 21,587,799 marks of twenty-six cents; Russia, 13,135,089 rubles of eighty cents. (These educational statistics are compiled from the one hundred and twelfth volume of the "Gotha Almanac.") But in addition to the rubles above credited to Russia, under the title public instruction (öffentliche Unterricht), which may include higher as well as lower schools, other appropriations are mentioned as made in the province of Finland; namely for "worship and instruction" 1,887,712 marks of twenty cents, and for " people's schools and prisons" 726,100 marks. Linking together the outlays for religion and schools is natural, where church and state are still wedded in union, but the coupling of schools and prisons is not so easy to be accounted for. In 1871-72 the outlay of Austria and Hun

gary for education was 12,860,051 gulden of forty-eight cents.

Governments may minister to the growth of knowledge by legislation concerning benefactions.

In 1723 one Betton, an Englishman, bequeathed the income of his estate, year by year, for the redemption of captives in Barbary. When such captives could no more be found, and the estate had become worth half a million dollars, parliament turned it into a fund for supporting free schools, and thus delivering from a worse bondage than that in Barbary. In the same spirit, in 1875, a Royal Commission reported that the trust deeds of educational funds now yielding £1,500,000 annually, but so tied up by testamentary restrictions as to be now of small use, ought to be modified, as their donors if now alive would doubtless modify them, so as to make those foundations more suitable to the requirements of the present day. They seek to escape the letter which killeth, but to give free course to the spirit which imparts life and rejuvenescence.

The earliest library of which any history remains was a governmental creation. It was in Egyptian Thebes, in the palace of Osymandyas, who flourished in the fourteenth century before our era. What modern explorers identify as its ruins was pointed out to me in the Memnonium. Over its door, according to Diodorus Siculus, was the legend, yʊxîs iaтpeiov, "The soul's house of cure," or dispensary. Such was the Greek interpretation of the figures of Thoth and Saf, the inventors of letters. Among other ancient libraries amassed at public expense those of the Pergamean king Attalus, and of the Ptolemean university are especially notable.

Of modern collections all those pre-eminent in size or value, such as the Vatican, as well as those in London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, have been gathered by governments. Japan had in 1875 already accumulated in her educational department thirty thousand foreign books. The outlay on the library of Congress-the largest in America—