In 1636 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed an act to establish a "schoole or colledge," and set apart a tract of land in "New Towne" as its seat, which they called Cambridge. Our Puritan forefathers had carried from the English university the conviction that "sound learning" is the "root of true religion," and were resolved, in their own vigorous phrase, that it should not be "buried in the graves of the fathers." In 1638 a master of arts of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, John Harvard, bequeathed to the new institution his library and half his fortune, some £780. A timber building was erected and a corporation formed which bore the donor's name. From the regulations in force in 1655 it is evident that in its manner of life, its laws of government, the studies taught, and the manner of granting the degree, Harvard College was a close counterpart of the English college of the early seventeenth century, its very phraseology including such terms as "disputing," "proceeding," "determining." It was the first institution of higher education in British America. Until the founding of the first state university, the University of Virginia, in 1819, the constitution afforded the principal model for subsequent foundations, and to-day colleges of the Harvard type are perhaps the strongest factor in American education. Harvard thus transplanted to American soil the full measure of the traditions of the Middle Ages, many of which exist in a modified form to-day. In "Harvard College by an Oxonian" Dr. George Birkbeck Hill suggests that John Harvard expected others to found similar institutions which collectively were to reproduce the University of Cambridge in New England. The supposition is by no means impossible, and the manuscript records in the Harvard Library would perhaps reward research. But whatever the intention, it is abundantly clear that in the full English sense of the word no second college was established at Cambridge. The first constitution was in all essentials the same as that of to-day. Hutchinson's "History of Massachusetts" records (1676): "There are but four fellowships, the two seniors have each 30_l._ per ann. and the two juniors 15_l._, but no diet is allowed: There are tutors to all such as are admitted students.... The government of these colledges is in the governor and magistrates of Massachusetts and the president of the colledge, together with the teaching elders of the six adjacent towns." The fellows are the forbears of the modern corporation, the tutors of the faculty; and though the institution has been separated from the state, the "teaching elders" are the earliest overseers. Furthermore, the endowment of Harvard has remained undivided; and generations elapsed before the present very un-English division was made by which the teaching force is separated into independent faculties for arts and the various professions. From the first the "college" was a "university" in that it granted degrees; and less than twenty years