1900

There being no recent class news of which the Secretary has been informed, for the present month this column will be devoted to statistics. The receipt of the most excellent Fiftieth Year Report of the Class of 1894, prepared by Phil Marden, has led to this statistical frame of mind. The venerable and distinguished gentlemen of this class have many qualities upon which to pride themselves but, in this report, the quality upon which they seem most to rejoice is the elementary fact that so many of them are alive. To the secretary, cognizant of the gloomy annals of his own class in this respect—of a vintage, moreover, six years later—this record of longevity was most disheartening and so he determined to find out whether the freakish aspect of the situation was in the mortality rate of '94 or of igoo. He entered upon the investigation the more readily as all the work was done by Miss Ford of the Alumni Records Office.

The results, as of August 1, 1944, for the ten classes from 1894 to 1903 (graduates alone included) are as follows:

Class Grad. Living Dead % Living 1894 86 48 38 55.8 1895 69 39 30 56.5 1896 56 24 32 42.9 1897 93 51 42 54-8 1898 71 42 29 59.2 1899 106 64 42 60.4 1900 123 58 65 47.3 1901 121 88 33 72.7 1902 135 87 48 64.4 1903 134 96 38 71-7

Now the secretary must insist that these figures are just crazy. Such results make the highly touted actuarial calculations, upon which insurance premiums are based, seem like wild hunches as to which way the stock market is to go. Why do the two classes of 1896 and 1900 appear to such disadvantage? Of course it may be asserted that those whose beneficent effect upon the welfare of the community is most striking, depart this life at a relatively early period (the good die young), or that the Great Author of the Universe visits his salutary corrections most often upon those whom He holds in highest esteem (whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth), but there are those who would object to this explanation. But who can account for the extraordinary persistence of life (like the tortoises of the Galapagos Islands) of the class immediately before and that immediately following 1900? Stretching the virtues of those organizations to the utmost, there can be no fair-minded person who would venture the judgment that their members deserve to live longer than those of 1900. No, it is just a cockeyed world.

Secretary, Hanover, N. H. Treasurer, 212 Mill St., Newtonville, Mass.