634 
NATURE 
[ Oct. 28, 1886 
our public acts to point always to the essence, and not to indi- 
cate the accidents. We, all of us, suffer from the complexity of 
modern life which presents masses of detail, demanding atten- 
tion, and distracting our imaginations with what seems to be 
but ‘‘a multitude of single instances.” We lose the thread of 
logic and law and only grasp the tangled skein of various issues. 
We are prone to class quickly a man, an action, a belief, and 
have done with it and him. It seems to save our time. In 
reality it dissipates and degrades our life. Let u< take a familiar 
example. We meet a man for the first time. Our friend classi- 
fies him for us. He is introduced to us as a man of affairs, a 
physician, or a lawyer. We accept the crude classification based 
on what he des, and we forget the divine possibilities of what 
he zs or may be. We indolently accept a commercial classifica- 
tion and omit the reckoning with all the unknown possibilities 
within a human being. We do him an injustice, and we go on 
to dull our own minds and souls by repeated ‘iterations of this 
stupid act until we become puppets meeting our like and not 
men meeting with our fellow-men. It is a lazy and a shiftless 
way, and unworthy of all of us. It inevitably dulls the mind by 
putting a word before a thought, a phrase before a principle, 
and this process ceaselessly repeated gradually eliminates all 
thought, and living men become mere dead automata in each 
other's eyes. Hardly any man is so dull that there are not pos- 
sibilities unknown to you within him. ‘lo classify him at a 
glance and by a phrase is to deny the divine spark in him and a 
perceptive sense in your own heart. It is true that the higher a 
man’s profession is the nearer should his life approach to the 
type signified by the name of that profession. It is safer to 
think you know s»mewhat of a poet when you hear that he is 
such than to predict the quality of a physician from his degree 
of doctor. 
Comftlete Human Beings.—The University has no higher 
ideal than to train its students so that their practice may agree 
with their professions. But their complete professions are by 
no means signified by the formal degrees with which we invest 
them. 
We grant the degree of A.B. to successful candidates. But 
A.B. does not really stand for what we have tried to teach. 
What we wish to teach our students and ourselves is to be 
complete human beings. Nothing /ess than this. There caz 
be nothing more. We wish them to be H.B.’s first—human 
beings—and A.B.’s afterwards. Let any one of us try to see 
what is meant by a deserved title suchas this. What és a human 
being complete in every way? Is there a manly virtue, is 
there a feminine grace, is there a divine aspiration which we 
can conceive to be lacking to such a personality? How care- 
lessly we use the phrase, and with what debased significance ! 
Is the man who has sacrificed his very nature to the service of 
money deserving of the title? Is it any better if power be the thing 
he has sold his birthright for? or vanity? or pleasure? or 
fame? 
The moment we reflect upon the inner senses and upon the 
connoted meaning of the word, we see how we have debased 
it. We are used to lift a beggar from the ditch and to say with 
a pity that is half repulsion—at least he is a human being. But 
when we reflect we see that we can give no higher praise than 
this to the men who are the chiefest glories of the race. ‘Think 
of David, King of Israel. How can we praise him, appreciate 
him, feel his power over us at this day, better than to recognise 
that he was a complete being human in every part? That is 
allied directly with Divinity. St. Peter, Socrates, the great 
Emperor Marcus Aurelius—these touch us through a chord of 
complete unison of their human natures with ours. What is it 
that is common to the great Alfred of England and to the poet 
who sang the beauties of the daisy overturned by the plough? 
What but this human nature that embraces our own and har- 
monises with its every part ? 
In America, young as we are, we have had our complete 
human beings. We can point to the oration at Gettysberg and 
know that the man who wrote it did so out of the fulness of a 
complete human nature. The soldier whose forces were over- 
come on that fearful field will live in history by his martial deeds, 
but he will be cherished in our hearts for the rounded symmetry 
of his humanity. _ In fiction we have all given this high degree. 
Where can we find more perfect examples than Col. Newcome 
or Henry Esmond? Is it not worth reflection to see why it is 
that these stand for us as types of what a man can become ? 
I think we can conceive of what our ideal of a human being 
should be by seeking to find the common quality of men so re- 
moved from each other in character and circumstance as King 
David, Peter the Apostle, Socrates, Alfred, Burns, Lincoln, 
Lee. The great Marcus has even defined such a man for us in 
formal words: he is “a man who delays not to be among the 
best, like a priest and minister of the gods ; who uses the deity 
planted within him, which makes him uncontaminated by plea- 
sure, unharmed by pain, untouched by insult, a fighter in the 
noblest fight, not overpowered by any passion, deep-dyed with 
justice, and accepting with his soul all that happens and is his 
portion.” 
It must be our aim and end to fix clearly in the mind of every 
pupil that the whole object of his college course should be one 
and the same as the whole object of his entire life, namely, to be 
areal human being. Not to strive for partial knowledge, for par- 
tial facts as an end, and finally to be graduated a Bachelor of 
Arts, but to strive for complete and utter manhood and to add 
to its magnificent qualities all the learning which our schools 
afford simply as a help towards carrying out his inmost and his 
highest aspirations. Each one of us should be ever striving to 
deserve among our fellows and in our most secret life this chief 
of all titles. The one that expresses the sum of all achievement — 
possible to us ; since when it is attained it fixes us as wholly 
human, and thus made in the image of divinity. The best title 
of our Master was the Son of Man, and He descended to this 
to show the term to which we might attain. 
A Word to the Graduate.—And now, members of the 
graduating class, I wish to say one parting word especially to 
you, who are soon to see the formal signs of the approval of 
your professors and of our governors—the Regents. : 
In the name of the University I welcome you to your new 
estate. If we have done our duty by you, you are equipped for 
the beginning of your maturer life. If you do your duty by 
yourselves and by society there is nothing which you need fear 
to undertake. Here, on the very borders of the most western 
sea, in a golden land of promise, let me repeat to you the noble 
words which were first written down eighteen hundred years 
ago, in the midst of a savage wilderness, in the presence of 
hostile barbarians, by the hand of the greatest and most virtuous 
of the rulers of imperial Rome, sitting alone and silent in his 
soldier’s tent. Let these great sentences be at once our farewell 
and our God-speed to each one of you :— 
“Tf thou workest at that which is before thee, following 
right, reason calmly, vigorously, allowing nothing to distract 
thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, although bound to give 
it back immediately—if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing 
and fearing nothing, with heroic truth in every word and sound 
which thou utterest, then thou wilt live happy—and there is no 
man able to prevent thee.” 
ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION? 
THE author began by referring to the results established by 
Gauss in 1839. Gauss proved: ‘‘(1) That the knowledge 
of Y (the west component of the horizontal component of terres- 
trial magnetism, called usually X) over the whole earth, along 
with the knowledge of H (the north component of H) at all 
points on a line running from one pole to the other, is sufficient 
for the foundation of a comflete theory of the magnetism of 
the earth. (2) That a finally complete theory was also deducible 
from the simple knowledge of Z (the component of the earth’s 
magnetism, that is directed to the earth’s centre) on the whole 
earth’s surface.”” There existed, for a large part of the earth’s 
surface, data for large charts of the normal values of the de- | 
clination of H and of Z, at the epoch 1880, from which X, Y, 
and Z could readily be deduced. These charts were accurate 
for the zone lying between 60° N. and 50° S. lat. (except for 
some parts of North Asia and of Central Africa) ; they were 
less accurate for 60° to 70° N. lat., and 50° to 60° S. Be- 
yond these limits in the south, lay regions almost un- 
visited since Ross’s Expedition in 1840-43; so that the 
charts were correspondingly weak in those latitudes. The 
charts show that the Challenger crosse1 the Antarctic Circle 
about the meridian 79° E. These and other somewhat recent 
observations made between 50° and 60’ S. lat., show that con- 
siderable changes in the magnetic elements have occurred since 
Ross's time, and therefore the charts for 1880 cannot be com- 
* “On the Advantages to the Science of Terrestrial Magnetism to be 
obtained from an Expedition to the Region within the Antarctic Circle.’ 
Abstract of a paper read at the Birmingham meeting of the British Associa- 
tion by Capt. Ettrick W. Creak, R.N., F.R.S. 
