You ask what sum would be desirable for the purchase of books and apparatus.  Certainly the largest you can obtain.  Forty or fifty thousand dollars would enable us to purchase the most essential books of text and reference for the schools, and such an apparatus for Mathematics, Astronomy, and Chemistry, as may enable us to set out with tolerable competence, if we can, through the banks and otherwise, anticipate the whole sum at once.

I remark what you say on the subject of committing ourselves to any one for the Law appointment.  Your caution is perfectly just.  I hope, and am certain, that this will be the standing law of discretion and duty with every member of our board, in this and all cases.  You know we have all, from the beginning, considered the high qualifications of our Professors, as the only means by which we can give to our institution splendor and pre-eminence over all its sister seminaries.  The only question, therefore, we can ever ask ourselves, as to any candidate, will be, Is he the most highly qualified?  The college of Philadelphia has lost its character of primacy by indulging motives of favoritism and nepotism, and by conferring the appointments as if the professorships were entrusted to them as provisions for their friends.  And even that of Edinburgh, you know, is also much lowered from the same cause.  We are next to observe, that a man is not qualified for a Professor, knowing nothing but merely his own profession.  He should be otherwise well educated as to the sciences generally; able to converse understandingly with the scientific men with whom he is associated, and to assist in the councils of the Faculty on any subject of science on which they may have occasion to deliberate.  Without this, he will incur their contempt, and bring disreputation on the institution.  With respect to the professorship you mention, I scarcely know any of our judges personally; but I will name, for example, the late Judge Roane, who, I believe, was generally admitted to be among the ablest of them.  His knowledge was confined to the common law chiefly, which does not constitute one half of the qualification of a really learned lawyer, much less that of a Professor of law for an University.  And as to any other branches of science, he must have stood mute in the presence of his literary associates, or of any learned strangers or others visiting the University.  Would this constitute the splendid stand we propose to take?

In the course of the trusts I have exercised through life with powers of appointment, I can say with truth, and with unspeakable comfort, that I never did appoint a relation to office, and that merely because I never saw the case in which some one did not offer, or occur, better qualified; and I have the most unlimited confidence, that in the appointment of Professors to our nursling institution, every individual of my associates will look with a single eye to the sublimation of its character, and adopt, as our sacred motto, ’Detur digniori?  In this way it will honor us, and bless our country.