But, rising at once to the noblest considerations, and regarding only the welfare of your country and the education of your race, what higher service can you render than by sustaining and cherishing the grandest thought, the purest ideals, and the loftiest aspirations which humanity has reached, and making your universities the altars where the holy fire shall be kept ever burning bright and warm? Do you think me an enthusiast? Look back through history, and see for yourselves what has made the nations great and glorious. Why is it that, after twenty centuries, the memory of ancient Greece is still enshrined among the most cherished traditions of our race? Is it not because Homer sang, Phidias wrought, and Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Thucydides, with a host of others, thought and wrote? Or, if for you the military exploits of that classic age have the greater charm, do not forget that were it not for Grecian literature, Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis would have been long since forgotten, and that the bravery, self-devotion, and patriotism which these names embalm were the direct fruits of that higher life which those great thinkers illustrated and sustained. And, coming down to modern times, what are the shrines in our mother country which we chiefly venerate, and to which the transatlantic pilgrim oftenest directs his steps? Is it her battlefields, her castles and baronial halls, or such spots as Stratford-on-Avon, Abbotsford, and Rydal Mount? Why, then, will we not learn the lesson which history so plainly teaches, and strive for those achievements in knowledge and mental culture which will be remembered with gratitude when all local distinctions and political differences shall have passed away and been forgotten? While I was considering the line of discourse which I should follow on this occasion, an incident occurred suggesting an historical parallel, which will illustrate, better than any reflections of mine, the truth I would enforce. The ship Faraday arrived on our coast after laying over the bed of the Atlantic another of those electric nerves through which pulsate the thoughts of two continents, and as I read the description of that noble ship, fitted out with all the appliances which modern science had created to insure the successful accomplishment of the enterprise, I remembered that not a century had elapsed since the first obscure phenomena were observed, whose conscientious study, pursued with the unselfish spirit of the scientific investigator, had led to these momentous results, and my imagination carried me back to an autumn day of the year 1786, in the old city of Bologna, in Italy, and I seemed to assist at the memorable experiment which has associated the name of Aloysius Galvani with that mode of electrical energy which flashes through the wire cords that now unite the four quarters of the globe.