ble: sometimes
on an Atlantic steamer, sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my
own library at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich,
Florence, and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the
benevolent reader not only the citation of different editions of the
same authority in different chapters, but some iterations which in the
steady quiet of my own library would not have been made.

It has been my constant endeavour to write for the general reader,
avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as possible and stating
the truth simply as it presents itself to me.

That errors of omission and commission will be found here and there is
probable--nay, certain; but the substance of the book will, I believe,
be found fully true. I am encouraged in this belief by the fact that, of
the three bitter attacks which this work in its earlier form has already
encountered, one was purely declamatory, objurgatory, and hortatory, and
the others based upon ignorance of facts easily pointed out.

And here I must express my thanks to those who have aided me. First and
above all to my former student and dear friend, Prof. George Lincoln
Burr, of Cornell University, to whose contributions, suggestions,
criticisms, and cautions I am most deeply indebted; also to my friends
U. G. Weatherly, formerly Travelling Fellow of Cornell, and now
Assistant Professor in the University of Indiana,--Prof. and Mrs. Earl
Barnes and Prof. 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