The institution which arose in the shade of this immense growth of pseudo-classical verbiage was a very modest undertaking indeed and developed little beyond the primary school and classical academy first established. These were housed in a little building in Detroit, twenty-four by fifty feet, on the west side of Bates Street near Congress, afterward occupied by one of the branches of the University. Scarcely more ambitious was the faculty of two men, the Rev. John Monteith, a Presbyterian clergyman who was President and seven-fold _didactor_, and Father Gabriel Richard, a Catholic priest who was Vice-President and incumbent of the other six _didaxiim_. [Illustration: THE CATHOLEPISTEMIAD, OR UNIVERSITY, OF MICHIGANIA A photograph of the original outline in Judge Woodward's handwriting; now in the University Library] Absurd as was the terminology and ridiculous as were its vast pretensions in view of the little French-Canadian community it served, nevertheless, the educational scheme which the act outlined was of great significance in the future development of education in the State. It was one of the first plans in America for a complete educational program to be supported by the people of a state.[1] Its sources were to be found, undoubtedly, in the strong influence of French thought on contemporary American life, for this scheme was but a copy of the highly centralized organization of state instruction which Napoleon gave to France in the Imperial University of 1806-08. As Professor Hinsdale says, "the ponderous name belonged to organized public education." Four years later, another act established in Detroit "an University for the purpose of educating youth" as the successor of the Catholepistemiad, with little change in the broad and liberal outline of the plan save in two particulars,--a change from classical to English nomenclature and the substitution of a Board of Trustees for the self-governing President and Didactors of the earlier scheme. [Footnote 1: No one of the old states had what we would now call a State University, although two or three states had institutions that bore that name, while several of the states had voted money or wild lands to promote higher education; nor had any of the new states, aided by the bounty of Congress, established such an institution that was worthy of the name, University.--Hinsdale, _History of the University of Michigan_, p. 16.]