In 1879 Mr.John M.Shirley published a volume entitled the "Dartmouth College Causes," which is a monument of careful study and thorough research.

Most persons would conclude that it was a work of merely legal interest, appealing to a limited class of professional readers.

Even those into whose hands it chanced to come have probably been deterred from examining it as it deserves by the first chapter, which is very obscure, and by the confusion of the narrative which follows.

Yet this monograph, which has so unfortunately suffered from a defective arrangement of material, is of very great value, not only to our legal and constitutional history, but to the political history of the time and to a knowledge of the distinguished actors in a series of events which resulted in the establishment of one of the most far-reaching of constitutional doctrines, one that has been a living question ever since the year 1819, and is at this moment of vast practical importance.

Mr.Shirley has drawn forth from the oblivion of manuscript a collection of documents which, taken in conjunction with those already in print, throws a flood of light upon a dark place of the past and gives to a dry constitutional question the vital and human interest of political and personal history.
In his early days, Eleazer Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth College, had had much religious controversy with Dr.Bellamy of Connecticut, who was like himself a graduate of Yale.