moneta. A few years later he was called to a similar post at
Florence, remaining emeritus professor at Pisa also. He subsequently
took up his residence in Rome as lecturer on Greek antiquities and
greatly interested himself in the Forum excavations. He was a member of
the governing bodies of the academies of Milan, Venice, Naples and
Turin. The list of his writings is long and varied. Of his works in
classical literature, the best known are an edition of the _Euxenippus_
of Hypereides, and monographs on Pindar and Sappho. He also edited the
great inscription which contains a collection of the municipal laws of
Gortyn in Crete, discovered on the site of the ancient city. In the
_Kalewala and the Traditional Poetry of the Finns_ (English translation
by I. M. Anderton, 1898) he discusses the national epic of Finland and
its heroic songs, with a view to solving the problem whether an epic
could be composed by the interweaving of such national songs. He comes
to a negative conclusion, and applies this reasoning to the Homeric
problem. He treats this question again in a treatise on the so-called
Peisistratean edition of Homer (_La Commissione omerica di Pisistrato_,
1881). His _Researches concerning the Book of Sindib[=a]d_ have been
translated in the _Proceedings_ of the Folk-Lore Society. His _Vergil
in the Middle Ages_ (translated into English by E. F. Benecke, 1895)
traces the strange vicissitudes by which the great Augustan poet became
successively grammatical fetich, Christian prophet and wizard. Together
with Professor Alessandro d'Ancona, Comparetti edited a collection of
Italian national songs and stories (9 vols., Turin, 1870-1891), many of
which had been collected and written down by himself for the first time.

COMPASS (Fr. _compas_, ultimately from Lat. _cum_, with, and _passus_,
step), a term of which the evolution of the various meanings is obscure;
the general sense is "measure" or "measurement," and the word is used
thus in various derived meanings--area, boundary, circuit. It is also
more particularly applied to a mathematical instrument ("pair of
compasses") for measuring or for describing a circle, and to the
mariner's compass.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Compass Card.]

The mariner's compass, with which this article is concerned, is an
instrument by means of which the directive force of that great magnet,
the Earth, upon a freely-suspended needle, is utilized for a purpose
essential to navigation. Th