Henry W. Sage and Ezra Cornell contributed more than a million to the endowment of Cornell University.  The gifts of Amasa Stone to the Adelbert University at Cleveland aggregate more than half a million.  Since 1864, Ario Pardee has given to Lafayette College more than five hundred thousand dollars; and the donations of John C. Green to Princeton aggregate toward a million of dollars.  Alexander Agassiz, worthy son of a worthy father, has donated more than a quarter of a million of dollars to the equipment of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and Anatomy which his father founded.  Joseph E. Sheffield endowed the scientific school at New Haven which bears his name.  The late Nathaniel Thayer, of Boston, contributed about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Harvard.  Among various institutions in the West, South, and North, Mrs. Valeria G. Stone, of Maiden, Massachusetts, has, within the last five years, distributed more than a million of dollars.  George Peabody’s benevolences amount to eight millions of dollars, about one fourth of which forms the Southern Educational Fund, and about one eighth endowed the Peabody Institute at Baltimore.  John F. Slater gave a million of dollars to the cause of Southern education.  The amounts contributed to college and university education in the last ten years may be thus summarized:[A]

1872 $6,282,461 1873 8,238,141 1874 1,845,354 1875 2,703,650 1876 2,743,348 1877 1,273,991 1878 1,389,633 1879 3,878,648 1880 2,666,571 1881 4,601,069

[Footnote A:  Compiled from various Reports of the United States Commissioner of Education.]

In the nineteen years since the close of the war, many institutions have been founded with munificent endowments, as Johns Hopkins, Smith at Northampton, Wellesley; and many more institutions have vastly increased their resources.  Harvard’s property has perhaps tripled in amount; Princeton’s income, under the presidency of Dr. McCosh, has greatly enlarged; Yale’s revenue has also received large additions.  Colleges in every State have been the recipients of munificent gifts.  Notwithstanding, however, these benevolences, most colleges are in a constant state of poverty.  Indeed, it may be said that every college ought to be poor; that is, it ought to have needs far outrunning its immediate means of supplying them.  Harvard is frequently making applications for funds, which appear to be needed quite as much in Cambridge, as in the new college of a new town of a new State.  At the present time, colleges stand in peculiar need of gifts for general purposes of administration.  Funds are frequently given for a special object, as the foundation of a professorship.  But the amount may be inadequate.  It is not expedient to decline the gift.  Properly to endow the new chair, therefore, revenue must be drawn from the general funds, which thus suffer diminution.  Donations are of the greatest advantage to a college, which are free from conditions relative to their use.