This is peculiarly the period of munificent generosity in public donations and particularly of gifts for educational purposes. Large endowments of new or long established institutions by the wealthy are of almost every day occurrence. A gift of this sort is hardly considered worthy of notice by the press unless it be among the hundred thousands. The example of Johns Hopkins in endowing the university of his name at Baltimore and of Judge Packer in founding Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, emphasized recently by the additional bequest of his son the late President Packer of the Lehigh R. R., of some four or five millions to the same college, are recent cases in point. Another remarkable instance of the same sort is the recent distribution by will of some hundreds of thousands of dollars among various smaller colleges by Mrs. Valleria Stone of Boston.

Nopenel can doubt that such a tendency to wards generous giving by the wealthy to endow educational institusions is most excellent. Among a democratic people like the Americans such conduct will always meet with particular approbation. It is nevertheless often to be regretted that such gifts do not fall upon a better selected objected often doubts their entire disinterestedness. Opinions may differ whether in an economic sense such institutions is the Vanderbilt University, in Tennesee, are the best means of applying a liberal endowment for education. In the continual multiplying of new foundations there must be in one sense a certain loss of time, energy and money. We do not believe that the higher education of the country should be concentrated in one, or oven in very few institutions. Every section should have its central college of liberal arts as a promotive to a broader education of the masses below. But the very best opportunities from simple economic reasons can only be offered in some few central universities of all sciences. It is these universities that are too often neglected for the sake of lesser and less important sectional colleges.

It is hard to educate up a public sentiment which shall appreciate the true importance of such higher centralized institutions which shall turn the tendency of endowments towards them. Thus it is that all these institutions like Harvard and Columbia depend for their enlargement almost exclusively upon a certain clientele, composed generally of their own graduates, who above all, appreciate the need and usefulness of such gifts. But such a fact too much indicates how slight a hold the universities have upon the class of other than college graduates. The idea of university education is popular; the application of it halts.