Excerpt from Beta Letters: Being the Correspondence Passing Between Chapters or Members of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity, 1839-1884 Beta Theta Pi was organized in August, 1839, by a group of eight young men then students at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. It was the intention of the founders, led by John Reily Knox and Samuel T. Marshall, to found an association of young men of intellectual ability, which should have branches, or chap ters, located at colleges, or in other places where such young men could be found, and who should endeavor to improve themselves by intellectual work and at the same time cultivate a friendly and fraternal sentiment, purposely restricting membership to small numbers and selected persons who would feel able, by reason of the intellectual competency of the men thus secured, and their close association and the cultivation of their fraternal sentiments, to place implicit confidence in each other. 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.