3. There is on the part of the students a growing comprehension of the value and of the necessity of a thorough education, and consequently a very much stronger desire and purpose to take long courses of study. This is one of the most hopeful facts connected with our work. It required a wonderful amount of determination and patience on the part of both professors and students to engineer the first classes through a college course of study. There was no public sentiment in the community, and no sentiment among parents or friends of the students, to encourage and stimulate to long courses of study. But a great change for the better has been wrought. The steady, persistent work of the past fifteen years, which has resulted in the graduation of five small classes from the college department, has created an atmosphere and established conditions which stimulate the desire for a liberal education, and foster the purpose of those who undertake to secure it. The educating power of a considerable body of advanced, carefully disciplined and well-read students, is marked upon all the lower grades, and especially upon those who come to Fisk University for the first time. The present senior preparatory class promises to enter college in May twenty strong. This is double the number of the largest class that has ever before been entered. 4. The influence and power of the work done by our students while absent from the University during vacation or after completing their studies, become more and more manifest. The reports brought back by the students themselves, the testimony of Trustees and County Superintendents, the new students brought here through their influence, all reveal to us as we have not realized it before, the greatness of the service the University is rendering to the cause of education, morality, religion and social life throughout the great Southwest. Our students are our epistles; and becoming known and being read by the people wherever they go, are turning the thoughts and hearts of others to the University. It is largely because of the faithfulness and loyalty of our students that the steady growth in numbers continues from year to year. We have, therefore, abundant reason to thank God and take courage. The great concern we have about the future is that our friends in the North will not be ready to meet the growing demands of this great work of uplifting the millions of recently emancipated people in the South, by a sufficiently large and constant giving. With the experience of the last fifteen years in mind, we can say with the full assurance of conviction that the call for the enlargement and strengthening of the University is in some vital respects more imperative now than ever before. Endowments are needed to adequately sustain the departments of study already established, and to found professional schools to meet the growing demands of a struggling and rising people.