Vassar was founded in 1861 by Matthew Vassar (1791-1868), an Englishman who had established in Poughkeepsie in 1801 a brewery from which he became rich. He got the idea of founding a woman's college from his niece, Lydia Booth, a school teacher. His total gifts to the institution amounted to about $800,000. His nephew, Matthew Vassar, Jr., became manager of the brewery after his uncle's death, and gave in all about $500,000 to the college. Vassar now has a campus and farm of about 800 acres, and possesses an endowment of $2,440,000. Its students number about 1,100. The Hudson near Poughkeepsie furnishes the course for the intercollegiate races in which American college crews, with the exception of Harvard and Yale (which row on the Thames at New London) have rowed practically every year since 1895. The river is spanned at this point by one of the largest cantilever bridges in the world. It is 2,260 ft. long and 200 ft. above the water, and is the only bridge over the Hudson south of Albany. It required 4 years to build the bridge, which was finished in 1889 at a cost of $3,500,000. It connects New England directly with the coal fields of Pennsylvania. Poughkeepsie has more than 50 lines of manufacture, with products of a total annual value of $15,000,000, including mill supplies, clothing, cigars, candied fruit and preserves, cream separators, foundry products, knit goods, ivory buttons, and piano and organ players. Two miles beyond Poughkeepsie the red brick buildings of the Hudson River State Hospital are passed on the right, and presently our route skirts Hyde Park (79 M.) near which, to the north, can be seen the estate of Frederick W. Vanderbilt. There are many beautiful country-places in the district. A little beyond Hyde Park on the west bank of the river is "Slabsides," the cabin home of John Burroughs, the poet, philosopher, and widely known writer on natural history. John Burroughs was born in 1837 at Roxbury, N.Y., the fifth son of a farmer. His first books were bought with money he earned from tapping maple trees, boiling the sap and selling the sugar. One season, he tells us, he made twelve silver quarters, and has never been so proud since. Although he has lived much in the world and has travelled widely, the greater part of his time has been divided between Riverby, in the little town of West Park, N.Y., the famous "Slabsides," his cabin in the wooded hills back of the Hudson, and, since 1908, an old farm house which he has christened Woodchuck Lodge, 1/2 M. from the Burroughs homestead in Roxbury. In his retreat at "Slabsides" he wrote some of his most intimate and appealing studies of nature.