was organized in 1864 as a department of this institution and he has been president of the institution since that year. He also occupies the chair of moral and political science in the college. He is President of the Convention of American Institutions for the Deaf. In 1886, at the invitation of the British Government, he appeared as expert before a British Royal Commission, in the interest of deaf-mute education. He had already been sent as commissioner to the Vienna exposition in 1873.
As an author he published in 1878 a popular manual of International Law, now in its fifth edition; and in 1887, he wrote and published the life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, his father.
President Gallaudet is a member of the Psi Upsilon Fraternity; the Sons of the American Revolution; the Social Science Association; the Historical Society; the Huguenot Society of America; The Washington Academy of Sciences; the Cosmos club; the Chevy Chase club; the University club; the Geographical Society; the Philosophical and Literary Societies of Washington; and he has served as president of the Literary Society, the Cosmos club and the Sons of the American Revolution. He is a trustee of Howard university and also of George Washington university. He is a Republican, and casts his vote at his summer home in Connecticut. He united with the Congregational church in his youth, and on his removal to Washington, in 1857, he became a member of the Presbyterian church. His reading has been varied, embracing history, biography, fiction and political science.
He finds exercise and recreation in bicycling and horseback riding, with swimming and rowing in summer. When about sixteen, he went through an especial course in gymnastics with very great benefit, and took up rowing at about the same time. His personal preference, he says, "was at first decided for a business life, but my experience in the bank made me conscious of its narrowing effect, and I determined, against the advice of many friends, to quit banking and go to college, and to follow intellectual pursuits."
His first strong impulse to strive for the highest things of the mind and spirit grew out of an intimacy begun in his fifteenth year, with Henry Clay Trumbull, afterward his brother-in-law, the distinguished Orientalist, Editor of the "Sunday School Times," who was six years his senior and "was highly intellectual even in his early manhood." "Home, school, early companionship, private study
