Although the remark that our University is poor, is not, strictly speaking, a startling one, yet of late the fact has been forced upon the attention of the writer in a new and sometimes vigorous way, namely, by the seating, or rather un-seating arrangements in many of the larger recitation and lecture rooms. Now, as every student is well aware from long experience, recitation rooms with us are little nitches cut out of an ideal paradise. This being the case, especially with those in Massachusetts and Harvard Hall, the question arises, why should the seats be like smaller nitches cut out of an ideal - something else. Consistency is known to be a jewel, and here is a source of unbounded wealth for our faculty.

From Mass., with its lines of cruel forms flanked on either side by an incongruous mass of broken chairs and desks, to Harvard and the funeral blackness therein contained, to Sever with its shiny but hard hearted benches, to our Laboratories with their curious devices for holding students, as it were, in situ for an hour at a time, - through all the weary round constantly the observer's wonder increases at the conditions under which existence can make even a partially successful contest with extinction. There are three or four main classes into which these seating facilities may be divided, first the "forms," next the chairs fastened together, third, chairs and desks, and fourth, broken chairs.

The "forms" consist of a plank, placed horizontally, with the hard side up, to sit upon, with another plank higher up to serve as a writing desk. Upon a victim attempting to assume an upright position, this latter plank comes into play upon the small of the back, after the manner of one of the ingenious devices of the Inquisition. These forms are shellackd, stained, or painted black, according to the taste of the architect, and numbered so as to contain twice their natural complement of occupants. The chairs, fastened together as in the larger lecture rooms, offer no special peculiarities, except that they give a consumptive slope to the shoulders. The cramping of knees and elbows, and a high degree of hardness they have in common with the "forms."

The chief type of chairs and desks we have in University, and these represent the highest point our faculty has got in the evolution from the primitive seats of our "arboreal ancestors." They are, for the most part, cheap wooden chairs, constructed with an entire disregard of the curves and angles of the human frame, and placed behind a sort of toad-stool formed of an iron upright and a small square of black walnut. This toad-stool desk gives no opportunity for comfort in writing, as it is not large enough to support the elbow and note-book at the same time, and an ordinarily bad chirography is thrown into a chaotic state thereby.

The last but not least of all the many devices in use, is the broken chair. There are many of this class; yea their name is legion. Some of them are patriarchs in which sat the professors of old; some of them are goody's chairs, rickety with many years of window-washing; some are quaintly covered with the initials of great men gone before, and all are on their last two or three legs. These chairs give rise to many amusing incidents which enliven the otherwise weary round of lecture-going. Now and then they give way all at once like the "famous one horse shay," sending the heels of the occupant high in the air and giving his cerebral system a violent shock. Some of them go to pieces, part by part, like an old wreck; first the arms, then the back, and finally one by one the legs fade away. Some of these noble old chairs are ruthlessly pulled apart by wanton freshmen, who in no wise regard antiquities, being so recent themselves.