HARVARD OCCASION

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 69, 18 September 1936, Page 9

HARVARD OCCASION

EXHIBITION AT OXFORD (British' Official Wireless.) RUGBY, September 16. An exhibition was opened at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, today to commemorate the' tercentenary of the foundation of Harvard University, in the United States of America. Harvard takes its name from its first great benefactor, John Harvard, whose home at Stratford-on-Avon, in Warwickshire, is now the property of the university. Harvard was a graduate of Cambridge University, England.

Harvard University is the. oldest and one of the foremost of American educational institutions. It is situated chiefly at Cambridge, Massachusetts, but also at Boston, Mass., and at other places. In 1636 the general court of the Colony voted £4OO towards a "schoale or colledge" which in the next year was ordered to be at "Newetowne." In memory of the English university, where many of the leading men of the Colony had been educated, the township was named Cambridge in 1638. In the same year John Harvard (1607-38), an immigrant Puritan minister to America, who died a bachelor, bequeathed to the wilderness seminary £7BO, which represented half his estate, and 260 books, and the college, then unorganised, . was named College in 1639 in his honour. The history of Harvard is unbroken from 1640, and its first commencement was held in 1642. The university institutions today include the botanic garden, the arboreum, the museum, the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, the Semitic Museum, the Germanic Museum, the astronomical observatory, a permanent summer engineering camp, about 2000 acres of wooded country maintained as an adjunct to the school of forestry, and a library which is the largest . university library in the country and contained, in 1928, 2,785,000 books. In 1927-23 there were 1311 officers of instruction and 10,748 students, and at that time the investments totalled £17,000,000, the total income being more than £2,000,000 a year. In 1928 alono gifts received equalled more than £1,000,000.