f
training young men for the ministry. This sum was increased in 1637 by
the munificence of John Harvard, who was a graduate of Cambridge, and
a finished scholar and clergyman from England. He gave eight hundred
pounds and his library, consisting of three hundred volumes, towards
the endowment, whereupon the college took his name. "The colony caught
his spirit," says Boone. "Among the magistrates themselves, two
hundred pounds was subscribed, a part in books. All did something,
even the indigent; one subscribed a number of sheep; another, nine
shillings' worth of cloth; one, a ten-shilling pewter flagon; others,
a fruit dish, a sugar spoon, a silver-tipped jug, one great salt, one
small trencher salt, etc. From such small beginnings did the
institution take its start. No rank, no class of men, is
unrepresented. The school was of the people." There is nothing in
history to parallel the heroic spirit and boldness of these early
settlers in attempting to found a college, surrounded as the people
were with poverty, scanty subsistence, and savage enemies. They did
not realize the wisdom of their liberality and sacrifice and its
influence upon the future civilization of the Western World. Harvard
College was located at Cambridge, with a single building, on less than
three acres of land. It was supported by government appropriations and
private philanthropy. For years the college was financially
embarrassed. The salaries were small, and for nearly one hundred years
were paid out of the colonial treasury. The President received a
salary of $600. The total grants made to the college by the colony
during the first century amounted to about $8,000. The total annual
income from all sources at the close of the first century of its
history was but L750. Down to 1780 the total amount contributed out of
the public treasury was $68,675 and 3,793 acres of land. Individuals
in England and America had likewise given $90,412.

No one at this period would have dared to predict that Harvard College
would have in 1892 an endowment of $12,000,000 and an annual revenue
of more than $1,000,000, with seventeen departments of instruction,
three hundred teachers, and three thousand students. But such has been
the phenomenal growth of some of our American institutions.

Among the colonial colleges, that of William and Mary is one of the
most important. As early as 1617, an attempt was made in England to
raise money to found a college among the Virg