But the "section-sixteen" allotment for the aid of public schools continued as a feature of all future grants within the Northwest Territory, and also in all the new States of the southwestern and trans- Mississippi territory erected prior to 1850, from which time forward two sections in each township (sixteen and thirty-six) were granted for school purposes, besides specific grants for higher education amounting to over a million acres. A recent student [Footnote: Joseph Shafer, "The Origin of the System of Land Grants for Education." Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 63. History Series, Vol. i, No. i, August, 1902.] of this subject has traced this policy of public aid to education back through New England, where colonies, in grants to companies or townships, made specific stipulations and reservations for the support of schools and the ministry and where townships voluntarily often made like disposition of surplus wild lands; and through New England to England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where, the monasteries and other religious foundations being destroyed and the schools depending upon them perishing, schools were endowed by the kings, sometimes out of sequestered church lands, or were established by towns and counties, in addition to those chartered under private patronage, so strong was the new educational movement of the time. In the Mississippi Valley, then, or the greater part of it--whatever the historical origin of the provisions may be-from one-thirty-sixth to one- eighteenth of the public land has been set apart to the education of generation after generation till the end of the republic--or as Americans would be disposed to put it in synonymous phrase, "till the end of time."