"EVERYTHING IN ITS COMPOSITE PLACE"

Perhaps to answer the theoretical question, "Does the time hang heavy in Hanover?" the daily "Dartmouth" has just finished an exhaustive "Investigation of Time" with the statistical conclusion that the average Dartmouth undergraduate "works nine hours, sleeps eight and one-quarter hours, and spends four hours in recreation on week-days."

Anyone who has seen a "composite photograph of the average American" has had a morbid distrust of all "composites" ever since. But the "composite Dartmouth man" in the Investigation of Time plays no dull, uninteresting part. He is not a mere paper-weights figure. He steps out from the statistics with an individuality of his own. That he is a man of taste and refinement is borne out by the fact that he allows forty minutes each day for dressing, and on Sundays ten minutes more. He is a man of varied interests, spending half an hour a day at the movies, twenty minutes at cards, and half an hour at football games and other college events.

But the chief recreation at Hanover as conversation, to which an hour and a half is devoted a day. A half hour on week days and forty minutes on Sundays are allotted to correspondence; but by the time the Average Dartmouth Man is a senior he finds letter-writing taking twice as much of his time as it did freshman year. Even as a senior, however, he cares but little for girls and music and things like that Music entered into his freshman life only eleven hundredths of an hour each day and girls three hundredths, and as a senior the two together absorb his attention for only twenty seven hundredths of one hour out of the twenty-four.

The "Dartmouth" has pointed the way. This attractive, irreproachable, Average Dartmouth Man, statistical as he is holds much interest and conjures up the prospect of a Composite Son of Harvard. Does he spend four hours of his day outside of classes, in study? Can he claim a fifty-five hour working week, lumping together studies, classes, and everything else that can be brought under the head of work?

Before poking fun in earnest at the Dartmouth Investigation of Time its real value should not be underestimated. It is only by some such wholesale stock-taking, individually and collectively, that it is possible to hold up the glass for the undergraduate to see himself. John and Charles Wesley were much laughed at in Oxford and nicknamed "Methodists" because of their adherence to a plan; but their "Method" spread until their religious followers are among the millions.

A Princeton wit, replying to the charge often made against the "New Jersey prep-school," says that Princeton is not a "country club. It is a roadhouse,--on the Road to Knowledge." We cannot claim more for ourselves than that. But it remains for the Dartmouth Investigation of Time to give a cross-section showing the life of the college as it is, with athletics, studies, and the much-misused word "activities" in their, proper proportions. Only when statistics like these are brought to the surface, is it possible to go beyond the title "Institution of Learning."