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of Scot was something quite different. Toledo saw its birth -Toledo, that now decayed Moresque-Hebraic-Iberian community, once famed for its rapiers. Then students thronged the great Cathedral library, filled with thousands of manuscripts, classic and Arabian. Here Michael Scot found the commentary of the Cordovan Averhoës, and slowly, laboriously, with the help of "one Andrew, a Jew," did the Arabic into the eternal Roman language. This translation, with other of Scot's, infiltrated to the Universities. It cannot definitely be asserted that he alone thrilled the students to activity; for the encouragement of church and governments, great teachers, less troublous times combined toward the mighty University growth. But about 1232, when Scot died, all the great Universities, with many smaller ones, were in the course of organization; and the half of them for no other purpose than dialetics based on the Bible and Averhoës Aristotle.

Scot wandered through Europe a silent, phantom figure. He did not lecture, as Abelard and William of Champeaux did. For a time he bent his energies upon astrology and alchemy, wrote books on them, those lures of intelligent men, unaware

"How bare the rock, how desolate,"

and flinging their precious labor upon waste ground. Inexplicable, how all the most intelligent, the initiates into the "Secreta Secretorum" (as the natural sciences were called), even the sensible Roger Bacon, had faith in such unrealities

-in potable gold, in the elixir of life and philosopher's stone. Superstition in no way presupposed stupidity or general ignorance. Indeed, Scot seems to have attained an omniscience possible only in such an untutored day. His treatises cover thoroughly every subject then known, besides much of the realm of the unknown and absurd. Of the man's character we naturally can learn very little. Highly conscientious, he refused a tempting archiepiscopacy in Ireland, knowing not the Celtic language of the See, spurning absen

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tee emoluments. Honored and respected he spent a few years at Frederick's Imperial court, then set forth through Europe, taking to the schools copies of his Averhoës, even crossing the channel to Oxford. He died in the north, in the sombre borderland, his birthplace, where the echoes of his name still reverberate around his legendary tomb.

Arabians, Averhoës, Scholasticism, Michael Scot-what do these mean for us? We may hold forth many fine phrases of their working in with the Larger Philosophy. In reality they are milestones long left behind by the slow-footed Clio, or rather huge monoliths, the superscriptions illegible, rising prominent in the mediaeval cemetery. However patiently we study the writings on these monoliths we cannot accurately descern what they tell of the bones beneath. Probably we shall never know the exent of the indirect influence these bones may have exerted. Michael Scot and the Schoolmen-we see them before us in a vision, observe the mediaeval audience in raw-hide shoes and long, dark mantles, hearken to their remote voices speaking their odd, complex theories. We feel that Scot and the theologians are working for the truth, so far as in them lies, that they are part and parcel of an abortive Renaissance.

Herbert Arnstein.

NOTABILIA.

The Junior competition is over, and we congratulate the contestants upon creditably reaching the close of a long and arduous effort. The LIT. competition does require great work and persistence: it is often a discouraging and confining struggle, as no one perhaps realizes but the competitors themselves. So much greater, then, is the reward of perseverance. There will be those of course who must fail of election; yet in otherwise than a material way, they have gained much. Indeed, for the man who tries conscientiously and persistently for the LIT. there is no such thing as failure. The election of editors by the Junior class will be held Monday evening, February twentieth.

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It is seldom that the competition for Chi Delta Theta reaches the excellence which has characterized the work of the present Senior class. It is gratifying to note that there exists such an interest in writing for its own sake, an interest beside the bare desire of making the board. As a result of this strong competition, some men cannot be awarded triangles, who ordinarily would have won. We wish to thank all the participants for their support of the LIT. during the past year.

The editors take pleasure in announcing the election of the following men: Herbert Luther Bodman, Charles Washburn Nichols, Cyrus French Wicker.

PORTFOLIO.

EVENING MUSIC.

Dim, dim

Through the distance a hymn

Comes to me slowly

Comes to me lowly,

Tinged with a melody

Throated with ecstacy.

Far, far

From the heavens a star,

Falls by me lightly

Falls by me brightly,

Struck from its majesty

Into eternity.

Howard F. Bishop.

Psychology demands much muscular discipline from its votaries, though it yields in return corresponding control. For instance, while commonly man, sober, sees but

PROFESSOR VON STERNSCHAUER'S EXPERIMENT.

a single object with his two organs of sight, it is possible for a psychology student after a few years of training to see two distinct objects, one with each eye, if he so desires. To attain a similar power, Von Sternschauer (of Bratwurst University) for a whole year would sit for an hour each morning before his apparatus-a blue bead the size of a buckshot, mounted on a string. He nailed down his chair, and fixed behind it a photographer's support for his head, so that the distance, ten inches, from his left eye to the bead never varied. He eliminated his right eye (by a little velvet jacket fitted over that glass of his spectacles) and then for an hour would peer with his left at the bead, being aroused at the sixtieth minute by an alarm clock. Afternoons he repeated this, but in a stationary chair nine feet behind the other and with the jacket over the left glass. He thus attained for each distance perfect steadiness of the eyeball, a prerequisite for proving the necessity of its motion for perception of the third dimension, his pet theory.

At the end of a year Von Sternschauer had such control of his organs of vision that he could fix one immovably upon an immovable object for any length of time. As a further preliminary, he now practiced the same exercise on moving objects. Keeping a motionless eye on a blinking lantern or a whirling rod proved a far different matter from the experiment of the blue bead. Nine years rolled by with Von Sternschauer sitting in his chair day after day, an hour each morning and afternoon. At length the end of the decade was at hand; the eyes seemed perfectly under his control, and the arrangements for the grand final test had been planned and executed to the smallest detail.

Von Sternschauer took his seat, and signalled "ready" to his assistant. Buzz! A small white cylindrical bar of wood, just ten inches from his left eye, began to whirr on its pivot. Simultaneously a ray of light played upon the eye-ball, to enable a kinetoscope to delineate its slightest motion. On and on whirred the cylinder, and wilder and wilder thumped Von Sternschauer's heart. For the whirling cylinder appeared to his eyes a stationary, elastic body, contracting and expanding in its length. Success was complete. The essentiality of eye motion to perception of the third dimension was no longer a theory, but a law.

Von Sternschauer almost fainted with delight, forseeing himself an M.R.S.P.R., a C.M.I.P.S.P.R., and showered with other dignities, which indeed he did attain. But his right eye is farsighted now, and his left near-sighted. Last week, while winking his left eye, he carelessly ran his fork into it, by mistake for his mouth. Since that time, he cannot perceive close objects, and has embarrassed several respectable ladies, calling them "Darling," instead of his dear wife.

But he has done a great work for Psychology.

Herbert Arnstein.

-They tell this tale away up in the fastnesses of Afghanistan, that are the eaves of the Roof of All the World, the everlasting hills that see a white man once in a thousand years. It is a strange story, a palace of pure fiction piled high on the foundations of dim tradition, but the timegarbled name of Alexander the Great runs through it, and makes it real.

THE WAY OF
A GOD.

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