Miss Howard came to Wellesley in 1875, giving up a private school of her own, Ivy Hall, in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in order to become a college president. No far-seeing policies can be traced to her, however; she seems to have been content to press her somewhat narrow and rigid conception of discipline upon a more or less restive student body, and to follow Mr. Durant's lead in all matters pertaining to scholarship and academic expansion. We can trace that expansion from year to year through this first administration. In 1877 the Board of Visitors was established, and eminent educators and clergymen were invited to visit the college at stated intervals and stimulate by their criticism the college routine. In 1878 the Students' Aid Society was founded to help the many young women who were in need of a college training, but who could not afford to pay their own way. Through the wise generosity of Mrs. Durant and a group of Boston women, the society was set upon its feet, and its long career of blessed usefulness was begun. This is only one of the many gifts which Wellesley owes to Mrs. Durant. As Professor Katharine Lee Bates has said in her charming sketch of Mrs. Durant in the Wellesley Legenda for 1894: "Her specific gifts to Wellesley it is impossible to completely enumerate. She has forgotten, and no one else ever knew. So long as Mr. Durant was living, husband and wife were one and inseparable in service and donation. But since his death, while it has been obvious that she spends herself unsparingly in college cares, adding many of his functions to her own, a continuous flow of benefits, almost unperceived, has come to Wellesley from her open hand." As long as her health permitted, she lavished "her very life in labor of hand and brain for Wellesley, even as her husband lavished his." In 1878 the Teachers' Registry was also established, a method of registration by which those students who expected to teach might bring their names and qualifications before the schools of the country. But the most important academic events of this year, and those which reacted directly upon the intellectual life of the college, were the establishment of the Physics laboratory, under the careful supervision of Professor Whiting, and the endowment of the Library by Professor Eben N. Horsford of Cambridge. This endowment provided a fund for the purchase of new books and for various expenses of maintenance, and was only one of the many gifts which Wellesley was to receive from this generous benefactor. Another gift, of this year, was the pipe organ, presented by Mr. William H. Groves, for the College Hall Chapel. Later, when the new Memorial Chapel was built, this organ was removed to Billings Hall, the concert room of the Department of Music. On June 24, 1879, Wellesley held her first Commencement exercises, with a graduating class of eighteen and an address by the Reverend Richard S. Storrs, D.D., on the "Influence of Woman in the Future."