"Competition of the Centuries" 



}\y L. P. G K A T A C A P 



A nature wise 



With u-atching from the dim verge of the time 



iriidt tilings to be are visible in the gleams 



TJirown fnnrard on them from the luminous past. — Lowell. 



The Journal publishes on succeeding pages many words of appreciation and praise of the late 

 L. P. Gratacap, but it could publish nothing about him which would stand as so powerful a revelation 

 of character and so forceful a memorial as his own words quoted below. They are taken from a speech 

 delivered at the Annual Dinner of the Associate Alumni of the College of the City- of New York, in 

 1901, almost two decades ago, yet, in many ways, might well have been said today. It is a privilege to 

 present them here. — The Editor. 



A moment ago I uttered the word years, 

 and as the vibrations of the sound passed 

 from my lips through this intervening space 

 of air, touched the delicate tympana of your 

 organs of hearing, and awoke motions that 

 were communicated to the reportorial activ- 

 ity of that group of bones which Professor 

 Draper insisted should appear on our exam- 

 ination papers in physiology, and passing by 

 filamentous nerves reached the receiving 

 brain, and there stirred the conscious mind, 

 what fancies, what regrets, and among the 

 younger members of us, what tumultuous 

 anticipations, did it not arouse! 



I know the subject of years is a delicate 

 one. We have grown accustomed to believe 

 that the fear of age, and especially of its 

 confession, is a feminine foible, but I have 

 noticed in a lifetime, not altogether unob- 

 servant, that it is also a masculine weakness, 

 usually met with masculine intrepidity in 

 the form of an unmitigated lie. For my 

 own part, and speaking in the confidence of 

 post-prandial satiety, I think I can say in 

 all frankness that I no longer feel any ti- 

 midity about the confession of my years. I 

 have passed that transition period when I 

 viewed with apprehension my increasing 

 grayness and the widening of my tonsure, 

 and when I indulged in an imaginative 

 struggle still to retain a despairing clutch 



upon tliat part of my life I had called my 

 youth. Now resignation, filtering down 

 through all the porous and susceptible sur- 

 faces of prevarication, has so hardened me 

 that I can meet with equal coolness and 

 equanimity the inquisitorial needs of the 

 polling clerk and the gentle importunity ot 

 the census man. 



But years are not simply matters of per- 

 sonal reflection. Years are those chrono- 

 logical atoms which build up the centuries, 

 those temporal molecules whose incessant 

 repetition fills out the everlasting voids of 

 time. Behind us is that vast accumulation 

 of mounds we call the nineteenth century; 

 and even while I am speaking, the ticking 

 of the clock and the infallible motions of 

 the stars are forming the outlines of a new 

 era. 



We are to be the witnesses of the "Com- 

 petition of the Centuries," and some here 

 may survive long enough to be the arbiters 

 of the supremacy of one or the other. It 

 seems to me that men of my years who are 

 not so young as to seek self-immolation in 

 the membership of a football team, nor so 

 old as to consign their physical activities 

 to the discretion and dispensations of a doc- 

 tor, may hope, as they have seen the achieve- 

 ments of the nineteenth century, ... to 

 be able to determine the motions and mean- 

 ing of the twentieth. Certainly we all, at 



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