In fine, this same taste for historical research, especially in the history of his native land, made him take a most distinguished place in the Royal Academy of Belgium, of which he was for thirty-one years one of the chief members, and especially in the Royal Commission of History, founded precisely for the promotion of the study of the national annals. Indefatigable in his labours, never-failing in his attendance at the meetings of the Commission, bringing to them the rich treasures of his learning, joined to the affability and conciliatory tone which always characterised him, we are told by one who knew him there, that never during that long period was there between him and his associates in that great work the least shadow of a difference. True to the end to his work for religion and his country, one of his last public acts, two days before his death, was to assist at a meeting of the Academy; and he leaves unfinished three works undertaken in the same holy cause: the Chartulary of the Abbey of Cambron, the preparation of materials for a general and diplomatic history of the University of Louvain, and the collection and arrangement of the short Flemish chronicles scattered in manuscript through the Belgian libraries, with a view to their forming a compendium to the great chronicle of De Dynter. But it is not with De Ram’s historical labours, great as they were, that we are chiefly interested. His great work for us has been the Catholic University of Louvain. That university was proposed by his Holiness Pope Pius IX. as the model which our bishops were to have in view in founding the Catholic University of Ireland. Over it De Ram presided for more than thirty years, in fact since its foundation; the difficulties, seemingly insuperable, with which he had to contend, were almost identical with those that press our Irish institution; the means for overcoming these difficulties in the two countries were very similar, and we may hope that the Catholic University of Belgium is but the harbinger of the success of the Catholic University of Ireland.