CATHARINE SAUNDERS 1872 - 1943 Professor Emeritus Catharine Saunders, who died on January 18, l9h3, had been connected with Vassar College since 1900 and after 1907 worked continu- ously on the teaching staff, a long and honorable service. Her education in preparation for her life-work of teaching was varied and rich. She was a high school student at Belfast, New York, where she was born, took her A.B. degree at Elmira College and her Ph.D. at Columbia University. She studied also for part of a year at the University of Munich, did research at the American Academy in Rome and enriched her background by travel that ranged over Europe from the Roman wall in Northern England to Ancient Troy in Turkey, with much time spent in Italy and Greece. On her last leave in 1940 she even went to Mexico, Guatemala and.Yucatan to see the remains of the Mayan Civilization. Her research, which was divided between the two main lines of her interest, included studies on "Costume in Roman Comedy", "Masks", "Altars"; and Vergilian Studies of "Cremation and Inhumation in the Aeneid", "Vergil's Primitive Italy" and "The Sources of the Names of Trojan and Latin Heroes in Vergil's Aeneid". All Miss Saunders‘ publications in book form and in periodicals snow her painstaking and exact scholarship, and her imagination in interpretation. In all her writing she was a perfectionist in her weighing of evidence, in her clarity of presentation. These same qualities appeared in her college teaching, but she was able to simplify and illuminate the re- sults of her research for undergraduates in her favorite courses in Roman Comedy, Vergil's Aeneid and Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin. She presented many of her papers to the Classical Journal Club and to the students‘ Classical Society as well as at the meetings of the American Philological Association and in all these her clarity of diction and expression were notable. Miss Saunders gave distinguished and appreciated ser- vice as an alumna trustee to her Alma Mater, Elmira College. On the campus of Vassar she won the devotion CATHARINE SAUNDERS (Continued) of her fellow-residents in Kendrick by her humor, charm, tolerance, and final Stoicism. The students who had the privilege of knowing her enjoyed her friendliness and hospitality. One of her last public services for them, was training the actors in a Mediaeval Latin Christmas Play given in the Classical Museum in 1941 with Professor John Peirce singing a Te Deum after it. Since she died, a young alumna wrote of her: "She was so gentle and such a great lady: she will be greatly missed." Her colleagues join with her stu- dents in offering to her Horace's tribute to her beloved Vergil: "The Muses who rejoice in the country gave her gentleness and geniality," - molle atque facetum. Elizabeth Hazleton Height Inez Ryberg X - 396