We cannot better learn to appreciate the improvement which the University has undergone in the two hundred and fifty years that have elapsed since its foundation, than by glancing for a moment at the early and primitive stages of its development.

What will our friends that walk leisurely to the morning, noon, and afternoon lectures with glowing pipe in mouth, say, when they hear that no tobacco could be used "unless permitted by the President with the consent of parents and guardians and on good reason first given by a physician"? Or can any one conceive of the Bursar's frame of mind, if some of us with a love for antiquity were to revert to an ancient custom of our fathers and pay our term bills in kind instead of in cash? What bliss to see him enter "butter, cheese, fruit, vegetables, grain, oxen, cows, sheep," or even boots and shoes in the clean pages of his account book.

Conceive in your minds a time when there were no professors, the President being the head master and choosing some from among the "Sirs" - the resident graduates, - "to read to the Junior pupils," and you may have placed yourself in a sufficiently historical state of mind to appreciate the subjoined list of Presidents in the course of whose administrations all the changes have been wrought that we are so justly proud of:

Henry Dunster, 1640-1654; Charles Chauncey, 1654-1672; Leonard Hoar, 1672-1674; Winan Oakes, 1675-1681; John Rogers, 1682-1684; Increase Matlher, 1685-1701: Samuel Willard, 1701-1707; John Leverett, 1707-1724; William Wadsworth, 1725-1736; Edward Holyoke, 1737-1769; Samuel Locke, 1770-1773; Samuel Langdon, 1774-1780; Joseph Willard, 1781-1804; Samuel Webber, 1806-1810; John Thornton Kirkland, 1810-1828; Josiah Quincy, 1829-1855: Edward Everett, 1846-1849; Jared Sparks, 1849-1853; James Walker, 1853-1860; Cornelius Conway Felton, 1860-1862; Thomas Hill, 1862-1868; Charles W. Eliot, 1869.