Excerpt from A Discourse Addressed to the Alumni of Yale College: At Their Annual Meeting, July 25, 1860 Assuming then, as graduates of this College, the grateful and reverent attitude of sons, we may claim, first of all, that we belong to an ancient family. Antiquity is indeed a relative term; and that which, measured by one standard, falls far back into the distance, when referred to an other, seems like a thing of yesterday. When, for instance, we compare the age of Yale with that of Oxford, which some suppose to have been founded, others to have been revived, by the great Alfred, we find little on which to build a claim for ourselves to an ancient origin. But when we substitute for the Old English University any of the great sisterhood of American Colleges, which the last fifty or sixty years have brought into existence, we begin to have some sense of our own venerableness - we look upon our catalogue with more of reverence, not to say self-gratula tion, when we find that it takes us back to the very commencement of the eighteenth century. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.