A BOW TO THE INEVITABLE

Although John Harvard has doubtless become well accustomed to turning in his grave since he was originally laid there, his body will certainly go through at least half a revolution when his ghost reads the extraordinary news in this mornings paper. In order that students may observe a common eclipse of the run, the machinery of Harvard College is to be set back for one hour. Shades of Galileo and Copernicus! Earthquakes felt in Boston, and eclipses of the sun recognized at Harvard! It is obviously the beginning of the end.

The whole business is simply one more proof of the many times repeated assertion that study of the classics is rapidly disappearing from American education in spite of everything that is being done to save it. This is the final body-blow, a wretched plot organized by enthusiastic students and professors of science, who hope to see the last defences of Greek and Latin blotted out in the shadow of the eclipse.

Fortunately, they are not to be successful. Even if a portion of their miserable scheme is carried out--that part of it which is beyond their control--they themselves will not live to enjoy the fruits of their victory. If the classics are to go, their advocates will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that they pull the temple with them. For, as has been previously announced, quake and eclipse are merely precursors of that more terrible calamity scheduled for February 6th, when the entire works--scientists, classicists, and everyone else--are to be eliminated in a common destruction.