EXHIBIT.  To take part in an exhibition; to speak in public at an exhibition or commencement.

No student who shall receive any appointment to exhibit before the class, the College, or the public, shall give any treat or entertainment to his class, or any part thereof, for or on account of those appointments.—­Laws Yale Coll., 1837, p. 29.

If any student shall fail to perform the exercise assigned him, or shall exhibit anything not allowed by the Faculty, he may be sent home.—­Ibid., 1837, p. 16.

2.  To provide for poor students by an exhibition. (See EXHIBITION, second meaning.) An instance of this use is given in the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, where one Antony Wood says of Bishop Longland, “He was a special friend to the University, in maintaining its privileges and in exhibiting to the wants of certain scholars.”  In Mr. Peirce’s History of Harvard University occurs this passage, in an account of the will of the Hon. William Stoughton:  “He bequeathed a pasture in Dorchester, containing twenty-three acres and four acres of marsh, ’the income of both to be exhibited, in the first place, to a scholar of the town of Dorchester, and if there be none such, to one of the town of Milton, and in want of such, then to any other well deserving that shall be most needy.’” —­p. 77.

EXHIBITION.  In colleges, a public literary and oratorical display.  The exercises at exhibitions are original compositions, prose translations from the English into Greek and Latin, and from other languages into the English, metrical versions, dialogues, &c.

At Harvard College, in the year 1760, it was voted, “that twice in a year, in the spring and fall, each class should recite to their Tutors, in the presence of the President, Professors, and Tutors, in the several books in which they are reciting to their respective Tutors, and that publicly in the College Hall or Chapel.”  The next year, the Overseers being informed “that the students are not required to translate English into Latin nor Latin into English,” their committee “thought it would be convenient that specimens of such translations and other performances in classical and polite literature should be from time to time laid before” their board.  A vote passed the Board of Overseers recommending to the Corporation a conformity to these suggestions; but it was not until the year 1766 that a law was formally enacted in both boards, “that twice in the year, viz. at the semiannual visitation of the committee of the Overseers, some of the scholars, at the direction of the President and Tutors, shall publicly exhibit specimens of their proficiency, by pronouncing orations and delivering dialogues, either in English or in one of the learned languages, or hearing a forensic disputation, or such other exercises as the President and Tutors shall direct.”—­Quincy’s Hist.  Harv.  Univ., Vol.  II. pp. 128-132.