This oldest college of the country was, as thus appears, the child of the State, and while it was the recipient of private benefactions, drew its sustenance, substantially, from the labors of the people. 1683, voted that, “Every towne consisting of more than five hundred families shall set up and maintayne two grammar schools, and two wrighting scholes to instruct youth as the law directs.” So cordial was the interest felt in education among the colonists, that many towns had established free schools before it was required. Within a year of the founding of Boston, in 1635, the citizens in town meeting assembled, voted to call a schoolmaster, and “Philemon Purmont was engaged to teach the children.” Dorchester, Naumkeag (now Salem), Cambridge, Roxbury, and other towns soon took the same course. Salem established a grammar school as early as 1637. Thus, within twenty years from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the foundation of the free-school system may be said to have been laid. It was frequently stipulated in the action of town meetings, that the poor should be provided for, and in Boston, at least, Indian children were freely taught. But in the provisions for “free schools,” “schools for the people,” and the “children,” it is not to be understood that girls were included. The broad terms used in the acts of the colonies and the votes of town meetings might mislead, in this respect, if history did not record the periods, long subsequent, when girls were admitted even to the “free schools” under restrictions, usually with great opposition. This long hiatus, during which girls went, practically, without free-school opportunities, picking up what they might at home, or by aid of the parish minister, was about a century and a half long, though in 1771, Hartford, Conn., opened its common schools to every child, and taught even the girls reading, writing, spelling, and the catechism, and, rarely, how to add. The boys, meantime, studied the first four rules of arithmetic. The hiatus between the foundation for the college for boys and even the seminary, or the academy, for girls, extended over a long century and a half; and that between colleges for males and those for females was, in Massachusetts, two hundred and thirty-two years long. A prime motive to the encouragement of education in America was that the Scriptures might be properly interpreted. This appears in the preamble to the vote of 1647 establishing schools, which were necessary as tributary to the college, and in the motive which led to the foundation of Harvard and of Yale, “the dread of having an illiterate ministry to the churches when our ministers shall lie in dust.”