Apparatus-Chemical Laboratory of Yale College, Origin of the cabinet of Mineralogy and Geology, YALE COLLEGE . CHAPTER I. From the settlement of the Colony of New Haven, to the time of granting the Charter of the College. THIS highly respectable institution, ranks among the most interesting of those monuments of beneficence and wisdom, which have transmitted the names of the Pilgrims of New England, to the gratitude of their posterity. With an enlightened forecast, that we can hardly reconcile with the spirit of the age in which they lived, they regarded intelligence and education as the surest foundations of piety and the safest conservators of liberty. Indeed, it may be considered as the peculiar felicity of our favored country, that its earliest institutions and policy were uncontaminated by the lawless spirit of military ambition or the lust of unprincipled speculation. Those who had witnessed and participated in the blessings of a reformation in the Christian world, could not but feel their attachments weakened for those corrupt governments that had for ages fostered and sustained a licentious and bigoted priesthood. The spirit of religious freedom nourished an attachment for civil liberty, and a conviction that even the purity of their holy religion had not escaped the contaminating effects of despotic regulation, led them to discern the fearful inroads that arbitrary power had made on the unalienable rights of man. Impressed with such sentiments, the fathers of New England formed the noble resolution of founding a new empire. With what feelings of honorable pride can the American citizen peruse the record of his country's birth. No miserable vagabonds driven by penury and crime from the abodes of civilized man to gain subsistence and safety in a desert-no wretched mariners compelled by shipwreck to become the unwilling tenants of a wilderness-no ignorant savages, nurtured like the fabled founders of "the eternal city," on a beastly aliment, are ranked among his ancestry; but he beholds an enlightened band of pilgrims, independent in sentiment, fearless in purpose, and rich in intellectual culture, freely abandoning the land of their fathers to plant the tree of liberty and sow the seeds of a purified religion in a virgin soil. Among colonists thus enlightened the interests of learning would, of course, be intimately connected with those of piety. They had seen the fruits of religious creeds when arbitrarily imposed by the terrors of power, on an ignorant populace; the cold ascetic, yielding to the gloom of repulsive superstition; the ardent fanatic, inflamed by the spirit of reckless persecution, and the pampered ecclesiastic, rioting in the excess of every sensual indulgence. From their own experience they knew that the tenets of their faith had been strengthened by examination, and they felt that the surest mode to quicken and purify the affections was to enlighten the reason. Hence, the establishment of elementary schools occupied the earliest attention of the fathers of New England, and the efforts made by them to advance the cause of education, embarrassed as they were by the wants and hardships attending feeble and ill provided colonies, and surrounded by the perils arising from a jealous and ferocious Indian population, are well calculated, while they excite our admiration, to repress the vain boastings that too often announce the ostentatious charities of the present age. The colony of New Haven, of which the present city* of that name was the seat of government, though previously occupied by a few settlers, was regularly organized in the year 1639; and on the 11th of May, 1665, an union was effected between the colonies of New Haven and Connecticut. The united colonies have since been designated by the name of the latter. Influenced by the same motives that had induced their brethren of Massachusetts Bay† to commence the foundation of Harvard College, ten years only after the settlement of their colony, the inhabitants of New Haven, and subsequently the united colony of New Haven and Connecticut, bestowed earnest attention on this important subject. The original design appears to have been, the establishment of a college in each of the New England colonies; but this intention was checked by "the well founded remonstrances from the people of Massachusetts; who very justly observed, that the whole population of New England was scarcely sufficient to support one institution of this nature, and that the establishment of a second would, in the end, be a sacrifice of both."* The records of New Haven furnish interesting evidence that no local selfishness operated upon the minds of the colonists, and that, although they were unable for a time to found a seminary within the limits of their own territorial charter, they freely contributed, according to their humble means, to the support of Cambridge College in Massachusetts Bay. The following extracts, it is thought, will not be considered as uninteresting. It may be remarked, as preliminary to the extracts, that the records of the colony of New Haven commence on "the 4th day of the 4th month, called June, 1639." On that day "all the free planters assembled," &c. The first Book of records appears to have been originally the mercantile and commercial account * Dwight, p. 48. |