The Graduates' Magazine

The June number of the Graduates' Magazine makes a good exhibition of the advantages which that admirable quarterly offers to the alumni and the University. The leading contribution is an interesting account by Mr. Henry F. Waters '55, the eminent genealogist and antiquarian, of his invaluable discovery of the facts concerning John Harvard's birth and antecedents. The fidelity and minuteness of Mr. Waters's researches make it doubtful whether existing records will yield any further information about the Founder. Should others, however, be emboldened to pursue the subject, they will be able to start with certain lines of inquiry that Mr. Waters's researches have opened. The identity of Harvard's father, Robert Harvard, and of his mother, Katherine Rogers, has been established, and his mother has been traced to Stratford. The house of Alderman Rogers, a colleague of Shakespeare's father in the local government, has been found, and as the early home of John Harvard's mother, is hereafter to be known as the Harvard House. As Mr. Waters's article concludes, John Harvard is no longer to be regarded as a semi-mythical figure, for he is really better known than most of the early English settlers of New England.

Second place in the Magazine is given to an unsigned biographical sketch of the late Wendell Phillips Garrison, who was editor of the Nation from 1865 to 1906. The high service to American letters which the Nation has performed since its establishment, is shown to have been due in large measure to Mr. Garrison's scrupulous fidelity, his success in enlisting the friendly co-operation of a large and able staff of contributors, and his constant striving toward literary perfection in form and substance.

Among the other contributions to this interesting number are the following: a history of the activities of the Harvard Club of Philadelphia, by Frank Haseltine '60; "Vital Statistics of Harvard College Graduates, 1830-1904," by Henry S. Mackintosh '60; some comments on "Theodore Roosevelt's College Rank and Studies," by F. J. Ranlett '80; an admirable statement of the "Ideals and Methods of the New Harvard Medical School," by Professor W. T. Councilman,--one that every Harvard man ought to read; two papers on Louis Agassiz, one by his son, Alexander Agassiz '55, the other by Professor Bure G. Wilder s.'62, of Cornell University; "Twenty Years of the Harvard Law School Association," by Winthrop H. Wade '81; and "Subfreshman Literary Stylists," by C. R. Nutter '93.

In addition to the regular departments, all of which give interesting resumes of their respective fields, and the records of the Governing Boards, the current number exhibits its usefulness as a convenient repository of current reports, speeches and records, which would otherwise be lost or difficult of access. Thus we find in full the report of the special Joint Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports, President Eliot's last speech before the Taxation Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, and an account of the late Mrs. Anna Kneeland Shaw, widow of Col. Robert Gould Shaw