THE SUN NEVER SETS

The actual contents of the mysterious inscriptions found last summer on Mount Sinal by Professors Lake and Blake, proved to the unscholarly listener less interesting than the circumstances under which they were found, than the very fact that they were found and deciphered. To the study of languages is added an important link--a connection between obscure Phoenician characters and Egyptian writings. For a scholar the story which Professor Butin of Catholic University tells of their deciphering must be of absorbing interest, regardless of the trivialties of the actual meaning. To those who make no claim to being scholars, the interest lay in the first hand glimpse into scholarship at its most interesting, into the strange country of which Cambridge is one of the capitals.

Professor Butin closed with the hope that the Harvard men who made the first discoveries would return to find more. His statement points to a fact which can scarcely be brought to light to often that a modern university is not only a storehouse of past learning, but a center for the gathering of new knowledge an agency which covers the glabe, from the Amazon and the Andes to the forbidden mountains of Tibet. Berein lies perhaps the answer to those who for one reason or another have questioned, from the founding of the first university, the worth of such an institution. Of the making of many books there is proverbially and truly no end; but the making of many books is not its only function; and only the shortsighted will deny that the deciphering of ancient tablets is not, in its way, as important as the constant warfare against disease which goes on in the medical school. It it a truism that from the past men may understand the future; it is also a truism, but a pleasant one, that on the empire of a modern university the sun never sets.