Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/553

 than to intellectual power and literary or scientific knowledge. The ceremony you have gone through to-day is not a mere matter of form. Its purpose is to awaken in your minds a lively sense of what you owe to the University, and what you owe to yourselves. You are going into the world with the stamp of the University on you as sterling coin. The degrees you hold will enable you to attain a position of eminence in the community to which you belong. How can you better evince your grateful appreciation of the honor the University has conferred on you than to prove by the zeal and ability, the good sense and integrity with which you discharge your public and private duties that you are worthy sons of your Alma Mater and that be the temptation to evil never so strong, you will not consciously stoop to do any thing that will cast the slightest slur on the fair reputation of the fraternity to which you will from this day forth belong ?

In regard to the University to which you and I belong, and are, I trust, proud to belong, I may be permitted to say that humble as its aims and limited as its functions are, it has done the work it has set to itself with creditable success. It has indeed no monumental buildings, no ancestral trees, no galleries and museums, nothing of a romantic or picturesque character to captivate the imagination by, no proud reminiscences linking it with names illustrious in the past for genius or heroism. It has had but a brief existence. Its life has been peculiarly monotonous. Year after year, examinations have been held, results published and degrees conferred, —a work which falls very far short of what many Universities in Europe have done and are doing. But none-the-less, I venture to assert that a great deal of good has already been done, and that the foundations are being slowly but surely laid of good in the future sufficient to satisfy all reasonable expectation. It is no small thing that of those who graduated during the thirty-two years from 1857 to 1889, there are at present on the rolls 1,974 Bachelors of Arts, 49 Masters of Arts, 317 Bachelors of Law, and 8 Masters of Law. The numbers that passed the examinations in Engineering and Medicine are less satisfactory, but even in this there is no ground for despair as the failure is in my opinion due not to a want of capacity on the part of the students, but to the absence of such a demand for Engineering and Medical Graduates as would ensure to them an honorable competence. The numbers of candidates for the Matriculation Examination and the First Examination in Arts have gone on increasing by leaps and bounds, —increasing of late years to such an extent that it was felt that the time had come for directing