Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE FOUNDATION The Origin of the Idea. Milo P. Jewett's Work. His Election as First President. His Educational Tour of Europe. His Proposed Plan of Study. The Opposition to the President. The Fatal Letter. The President's Resignation. President Jewett'a Work. The Comments of the Press on the College. The Election of John Howard Raymond as President, and His Plans. The Prospectus of 1865. The First Faculty. The Opening Day and First Students. What were the influences that developed a great and novel idea in the mind of a man of such training and life as Mr. Vassar's and fixed his name among the founders of Merton, Harvard, Yale? It may be answered definitely that little, or nothing, was due to the scattered efforts sketched in the first chapter. Apparently Matthew Vassar had heard nothing of them. Indeed the press notices of his own project reveal a general unconsciousness of the fact that there were advocates of woman's college education before Vassar, and the letters of the men nearest the educational problem indicate that the movements we have recounted had made little general impression. Even Dr. Jewett, himself engaged in the education of girls, and in touch with colleges as well as schools, calls Vassar " the first female college in the world." Was the idea due to a suggestion of his niece, Lydia Booth? She had a small school in Poughkeepsie, and her uncle owned the building. He had many talkswith her, he tells us, and her suggestion of an institution of " a higher order than any then existing " " made a deep impression on his mind." He came to think that this was the chief source of the idea and so tells his trustees,1 and it is to be noted that at this time he makes no reference whatever to Dr. Jewett, whose influence was then near its end. In an autobiog...