L I G) R.ARY OF THL U N 1 V ERS ITY or 1 LLl NOIS BSIaTa V.24 W. E. HORTON HnOKBINDER VOL. XXIV OCTOBER, 1923 NO. 3 BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY ON THE HILL The Editor 63 Dedication of the New Chemical Laboratory — Hired Man vs. Our Own Boss — Obligations of College Graduates — Athletic Expansion — Lincoln Field's Varied Architecture — Eight Brunonian Girls TREASURES OF THE JOHN HAY LIBRARY . . . C. A. Collins Jr. 67 THE POLICY OF BROWN 71 A $26,400 BEQUEST 72 UNTO THE FOURTH GENERATION W. H. Munro 73 TWO ROMAN POEMS C. H. Forbes 73 THE METCALF LABORATORY (Pictures) 74 WANTED: MORE MEMBERS A. H. Gurney 75 ON THE GRIDIRON 76 CAMPUS NEWS 77 BRUNONIANS FAR AND NEAR 80 Published Monthly, August and September excepted, by the Brown Alumni Magazine Co. at Brown University, Providence, R. I. Entered at the Post GfiEce at Prov- idence, R. I., as second-class matter under the law of March S, 1879 TEN CENTS A COPY ONE DOLLAR A YEAR Financial Co-operation That You Need While our main function is to give a safe, con- venient service in connection with transactions involving money, we are also prnpared to help our patrons in many other ways. One of the most helpful aids to our customers comes through the ability of our officers to give reliable financial counsel when requested. You are invited to take advantage of all the facilities that this bank offers. Your patronage will be welcome — ^and appreciated. Industrial Trust Co^ Member of Federal Resenfe System TlMse desiring Conyenient, Safe and Profresaiye Banking Facilities can find such at THE Mechanics National Bank Oyfb SaOroad Station and Chj Hall DIRECTORS Charles C. Harriiagtoa Herbert W. Rice Hugh F. l£acColl H. Edward Tburstoa E. Tudor Gro8« Charles C Marshall J. Palmer Barstow ^^lacfesitone Canal i^ational Panfe 20 Market Squar« Capital Stock $500,000 Surplus and Undivided Profits over $750,000 ALBERT R. PLANT, President JOHN B. BRANCH, Vice President CHARLES P. BROWN, Cashier Directors Herbert F. Hinckley John B. Branch Edwin M. Dodd Albert R, Plant C. Moulton Stone William A. Viall Charles H. Merriman, Jr. Fletcher H. Mason Frank O. Field Henry S. Chafee BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY Success and Security The Trust Company serves the individual not only in the attainment of business success through useful commercial services, but also in helping to conserve the financial rewards of this success for the per- manent benefit of heirs and dependents. For over half a century this Company has been intimately identified witb many of Rhode Island's representa- tive businesses, and it has also been entrusted with the handling of hun- dreds of Rhode Island's most import- ant estates during this same period. The benefits of this extraordinary experience in commercial and fidu- ciary matters may be extremely val- uable to you. Will you take advan- tage of them? Our officers will be glad at any time to confer with you relative to business and estate matters without obli- gating you in any way. ^ Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company 15 WESTMINSTER ST. PROVIDENCE 216 MAIN ST. PAV/TUCKET The Oldest Trust Company in New England Waterfalls, transformed into electricity, carry the trains of the C. M..& St. P. 650 miles over the Rockies. And you know what coal costs! Saving coal is impor- tant, but saving human energy is much more impor- tant. General Electric Company designs and produces the equip- ment by which elec- tricity does both. • Fifty-one G-E electric loco- motives are tiow doing the same work which 130 coal and oil-burning engines used to do on the 650 mile electri- fied sections of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul. Engineers estimate that the complete electrification of our railroads would save over 100 million tons of coal a year. GENERAL ELECTOIC BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY VOL. XXIV PROVIDENCE, OCTOBER, 1923 NO. 3 On The Hill A LL Brown men and friends of the "^ university are cordially invited to attend the dedication of the nev Jesse Metcalf Chemical Laboratory at three o'clock on Wednesday after- noon, October 10. Guests are being invited from other colleges and from the chemical industry. Brown men are expected to attend without indi- vidual invitations. The Chemistry Department will en- tertain the Corporation of the Uni- versity and guests from other institu- tions at a buffet luncheon in the Fac- ulty Club, 13 Brown street, on Wed nesday. At two-thirty the Faculty, the Corporation and their guests will march in academic costume to the new laboratory for the dedication ex- ercises, which will be held out of doors, on the rear campus, weathei" permitting. The principal speakers will be President Faunce, Mr. Jesse H. Metcalf, the donor, and Professor J. W. McBain of Bristol University, England. After the exercises the lab- oratory will be open for inspection and will be visited by those attending the exercises. In the evening at seven o'clock the Chemistry Department will give a dinner in honor of Mr. Jesse H. Met- calf and Professor James W. McBain in Sayles Hall. The Corporation, the visiting committee to the Department of Chemistry, the Building Commit- tee, and visiting representatives from other colleges will be their guests. On the evening preceding the ded- ication, the University will be the host at a small dinner at the Faculty Club in honor of President James Rowland Angell of Yale and Pro- fessor James W. McBain. It is ex- pected that Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes will speak. Guests will be all members of the Brown Faculty of professorial rank, the Cor- poration, and a few representatives of the State and city governments and Rhode Island educational institu- tions. The Jesse Metcalf Chemical Labo- ratory was given to Browii Univer- sity by Mr. Jesse H. Metcalf of Prov- idence in honor of his father. The architects were Day and Klauder of Philadelphia. The Building Com- mittee consisted of Mr. Edmund Wood of New Bedford and Messrs Jesse H. Metcalf, Augustus H. Fiske and Edwin A. Burlingame of Provi dence. The laboratory will go into active use by the University immed- iately after the dedication. TDROBABLY there comes a time in ^ the lives of most of us when we ask ourselves whether on the whole it is better to be "hired men" or "our own bosses." The man who has served someone else for a salary is apt to think it would have proved more advantageous if he had set up in business for himself ; the independ- ent business man wishes that he were free from the difficulties incident to commercial, industrial and financial responsibility and sure of a weekly envelope or monthly check. Of course there are exceptions, but this we be- lieve, is a fairly general rule. It re- flects the common experience that "the other fellow's job looks better than mine." 64 BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY Speaking (editorially) for our- selves, it seems that if we could begin over again, we would set up inde- pendently, though there have been many compensations in the contrary course, into which we rushed without much thought of where it might be leading. And now we note with in- terest what has happened in the case of a young Brown man who is the owner and business manager of a weekly newspaper in a Massachusetts town. He is Raymond W. Sheldon, and the paper is the Webster Times. It has been one of the most prosper- ous of Bay State weeklies, and the other day it announced that on the first of October it would issue a daily under the name of the Webster Evening Times. Its weekly edition, containing sixteen pages and an ex- traordinary amount of advertising, indicates that it serves a community populous enough to maintain a more frequent issue. We envy Mr. Sheldon, starting out in charge of an independent daily newspaper property like this. He will have his trials and tribulations, like all of us, but what he builds will be his own, and he will have the satis- faction of seeing his business grow with the growth of the town, already a community of fifteen thousand people. A NOTHER similar instance occurs "^ to us. The other day a prosper- ous business man in a small town died. There are prosperous business men, even in small towns. This one had put two boys through Brown and a third through a technical school. He was in his early fifties, with seemingly a long allotment of happy years ahead of him, when suddenly his life was cut short after a hospital operation. The day following the funeral we saw the two elder sons, both graduates of Brown, hard at work delivering coal. One of them, as we passed, was bent under a loaded basket. Many thoughts flash- ed through our mind ; chief among them was one of vicarious satisfac- tion that these two boys were sturdily taking up the work from which their father had been so suddenly torn and that one of them, at least, would prob- ably go on permanently with it. The feeling of satisfaction that this hum- drum incident created in us was based on the conviction that here was an independent business that would not lack for someone to continue it, and that the two Brown graduates struggling under coal baskets saw nothing inconsistent with their "lib- eral education" in unloading a coal truck and carrying its load to a neighboring chute. We should have liked a snapshot of these two young, men doing their fair share of the ev- eryday work of the world. Person- ally we would rather be in the shoes of the one who, we understand, will go on with his father's business than take our chances of a larger ultimate position by way of a clerkship in a city maelstrom at someone else's beck and call. * * * PP OR what purpose was Brown Uni- ■*■ versity founded? The charter answers the question as follows: "Whereas Institutions for liberal Ed- ucation are highly beneficial to So- ciety by forming the rising Gen- eration to Virtue, Knowledge, and useful Literature; and thus preserv- ing in the Community a Succession of Men duly qualified for discharging the Offices of Life with Usefulness and Reputation. . . ." It appears then that the university was founded to equip men for use- fully and reputably discharging the offices of life. But what are the of- fices of life? The phrase of course means more than political offices. It BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY 65 includes the entire scope of human activities, or at least those activities that have to do with a man in his re- lations with and responsibilities to- wards his fellow men. The framers of the charter evi- dently expected that graduates of the university would employ to some al truistic end the education they re- ceive in their four years course. They did not expect them to hide their ac- cumulated knowledge in a napkin, they were not intended to be selfish with it. They were not to make cul- ture an end in itself. This opens up a limitless field for discussion. Has a man any right to absorb information, learning, wis- dom, from his college course and not give it out in some way to his fel- lows? A man has a right to happi- ness, and if he gets happiness from contact with books, if, having re- ceived a college training, he is there- by enabled to live an intellectual life such as would not have been possible to him in the same measure other- wise, he is entitled to devote a por- tion of his leisure time to further accumulation, to reading as a pas- time, to browsing along literary lanes, and all this without any settled thought of benefitting somebody else. It would be a pity if we felt ourselves under obligation to turn every intel- lectually-occupied moment to account And yet there is something narrow and incomplete in the intellectual life that produces nothing except in the mind of the man who leads it. To anyone who, like the present writer, has been engaged for many years in expressing his thoughts on paper for publication through the medium of the daily press, to whom everything he reads becomes by instinct possible "copy," it is abnormal for a human being to be content with accumula- ting and not subsequently giving out. One trouble with the writer for a daily newspaper often is that he does not have time enough to accumulate. This recalls to our mind the observa- tion of a veteran editorial writer thirty-odd years ago: "You can't give milk unless you eat grass." But how about the people who eat grass and don't give milk? How about the men who spend hours every day in reading and research and never re- flect that what they thus acquire would be of interest and profit to their friends? Of course a man may easily become a bore if he talks or writes too much of what he reads. But there is a happy medium between the profuse expounder and the clam-like reader who shuts his shell and never gives out anything. f~\ NE forceful consideration in the ^-"^ development of our athletic fa- cilities at Brown is the fact that now- adays the best preparatory schools are making liberal provisions for such facilities and it will not do for us to be so far behind as to subject ourselves to scornful comment from Freshmen who come from these schools. There is no need to argue the propriety of our desire to secure boys from the leading high schools dnd academies. We rejoice in their coming and we simply must provide them with up-to-date athletic grounds and a modern gymnasium, as well as with adequate classrooms, libraries and dormitories. They must have first-class physical as well as mental instruction. There must be an abundance of tennis courts, baseball diamonds and football gridirons. The purchase and laying out of the new playground on Thaver street was a step in the right direction, partic- ularly with Lincoln Field so seriously encroached upon by new buildings. As we are an old grad ourselves (to 66 BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY use the familiar newspaper plural), we greatly regret the necessity that has destroyed the original character of that once convenient athletic space. There was nothing quite like the handiness of remaining in one's campus room until five minutes be- fore game time and then proceeding leisurely to the field with a window- cushion to ameliorate the unyielding hardness of the old wooden grand stands. But Lincoln Field is no more — at least in its primal linear glory, and we must go elsewhere for our college matches. The Thayer street grounds will do for tennis and intramural baseball. But of course a much larger space is required for intercollegiate sport and even for some of the interclass and interfra- ternity rivalry of the future. * * * '"pHE latest structure to make its appearance on Lincoln Field is the least attractive. We understand it is to be temporary — the more strictly temporary it proves, the bet- ter. It is a steel annex to the Engi- neering Building, with a sawtooth roof and would do scant credit to the back street of a Pennsylvania coal town. Lincoln Field had already become a most extraordinaiy architecturscl conglomeration, even without this newest structure. It seems as if the architects commissioned to design the several buildings there had at- tempted to see what diverse styles they could exhibit — and yet for many years now we have been supposed to adhere to a harmonious Colonial or Georgian development. The matter has become highly serious. Either let us have a style and conform to it or let us abandon the idea of ar- tistic consistency and frankly an- nounce that we propose to strive after the most various eifects. Lincoln Field might be used by the Depart- ment of Art to illustrate almost all the architectural styles and periods, but we do not understand that this is what the Corporation had in mind when it voted to employ an expert adviser and follow the Colonial mode. That mode may or may not be the best available, but it has its merits Phillips Andover Academy, which we have recently re-visited, has used it consistently and with' impressive results. Mr. Guy Lowell, who de- signed our Carrie Brown Tower, is just now completing a new recita- tion hall at Andover which shows what can be done with the Colonial, broadly but sympathetically inter- preted. It is a long red brick build- ing with a tall and slender white tower in which appears a blue-faced clock with gold numerals and hands. The building accords with the plainer Colonial structures that surround it. So does the new memorial tower erected near by in honor of Ando- ver's sons in the Great War. But at Brown ! Good heavens ! We have translated our creditable Colonial in- tention into a variety which, unfor- tunately, age cannot wither nor cus- tom stale, but which on the contrary becomes no less discordant or obtru- sive with the passage of the years. And the metallic addition to the dis- cordant group on Lincoln Field is the worst, unless we should award the prize for inappropriateness to the undisguised factory-construc- tion chimney against which alumni protest is increasingly audible. W/ E are interested in the fact that elsewhere in this issue of the Monthly eight births are recorded — all girls. What does this mean? Is there something in the old theory that only in time of war a marked pre- ponderance of male infants occurs*^ BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY 67 Perhaps we may infer from the ad- vent of these eight young ladies in Brunonian households that the world is in for a long period of peace — or at least our corner of the world is. At any rate, welcome to the Eight Brunonian Sisters. May they all at- tend the Women's College and be filial daughters of Mother Brown. Treasures of the John Hay Library Bv Clarkson J. QJlius Jr., igo8 (This is the first of two installments. The second will appear in November) ■ %1' ft: fffmiZHm'^tfd ttioiite liK^i fits iwiuT fO if^mh cr-mrdiir t«ss tn i-.'^^kSi PAGE FROM A LATIN PRAYER BOOK DATING FROM 1350 THE Library of Brown University, or as we more commonly call it the John Hay Library, ranks fourteenth among the five hundred odd colleges in the United States as to the number of volumes con- tained. Contrast this position with that of the University as to student enrollment, eighty-fourth, and some idea of the com- parative value of our library may be ob- tained. No college in the country of the size of Brown has a library which can equal ours. Only thirteen of the eighty- three colleges which are larger than Brown have libraries exceeding ours in size. In these figures there is found just reason for pride in the John Hay Library. It is of course true, however, that the value of a library lies not primarily in its size but in the character of its content?, and it is from this viewpoint that I write. I doubt if any man, with the exception of Mr. Koopman, our Librarian, realizes 68 BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY hfsw valuable from scholastic and antiqua- riasi standpoints, how intensely interesting on account of their beauty or the associ- ations which accompany them, are hundreds of the rare books and documents to be seen in the John Hay Library. Those who love a fine book, those whose imagination brary is a small Service Book of the Greek Church which dates from the 11th century. This manuscript is probably as old as the earliest complete Old Testament in He- brew known to exist — that in the Vatican Library — which was written in 1009 A. D. Although it will soon see its one thousandth im men fi immmn mtimK*c \{i)imu[an(to:0mita\\tmpnn npioctmuuitCmwamCcam RICHLY ILLUMINATED BOOK OF HOURS; FIFTEENTH CENTURY takes fire at the sight of an ancient man- uscript, will find the building a veritable treasure house. It would take far more space than the Alumni Monthly can put at my disposal to describe, or even list, the innumerable items of interest. In this article I shall mention only a few of the more important. As is to be expected, the contents of the older manuscripts are almost without ex- ception ecclesiastical in nature. . The monks who labored upon these sheets of vellum devoted no time and little thought, we are led to believe, to worldly matters. Of these manuscripts the oldest in the li- birthday it is in a splendid state of preser- vation and a good scholar with good eye- sight could read it to-day as easily as the day it was first used. In appearance this ancient prayer book is simple to an extreme when compared with the more richly illuminated manu- scripts of later centuries. The first page of one of these, a diminutive Latin manu- script dating from about 1350, is illustrated herewith. The page measures 3x4 inches. The rich colors of the original, vermilion, blue, brown and green with a liberal amount of gold leaf, cannot even be sug- gested in the engraving. BROWN ALUMNI MONTHLY 60 A more elaborate manuscript than this is a Latin Book of Hours of the 15th cen- tury — the period in which the hand-written manuscript reached its highest develop- ment artistically, and the period also which saw the beginning of the competition from printed books. This Book of Hours is rich with color beyond description. The two pages shown here are but pale ghosts of the real thing. The initial letter of ev- rarity because Latin was so decidedly the cultural language of the Middle Ages. One example of a departure from the customary practice is a Flemish Book of Hours which was transcribed in some old monastery about the year 1420. The ex- ecution of this work — it is rather larger than most manuscript volumes — is fully a^ perfect as that of its Latin brothers. The binding used, it is intei-esting to note, con- ~~^ rir c-TtiiiJtJt%