[We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest.]

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

May I, as Chairman of the Trophy Room Committee, reply to the charges of neglect and mismanagement made by a correspondent in your issue of last Saturday? If your correspondent will look at the Trophy Room, he will see the reason why at the present moment banners, footballs, the Ardsley Cup, and other trophies are stored in the Gymnasium cellar. There is no room for them in the Trophy Room. What banners hang there are too closely spaced, and of the two cases there, one is already over-crowded with baseballs, and the other, devoted to football, baseball, and track cups has no more space than can be devoted to a very limited future. The writer will also see that if more space is to be gained for banners and cases, some, at any rate, of the pictures of the teams on the walls must be removed.

Now the Committee has also for some time been aware of the unsatisfactory state of the room, and has on hand a definite scheme for bettering matters and for future development. This plan contemplates:

(1) The removal of the pictures from the walls and the placing of them in revolving cases where they can be properly grouped and arranged and more easily consulted than at present.

(2) The instalment of more cases in the space thus gained for the accommodation of footballs and cups.

(3) The rehanging if possible of the banners, all about the room, properly spaced.

It is with the first point that the Committee is now occupied. Cases such as have been described cost in the neighborhood of $300 apiece; and a beginning, and we hope a precedent, in raising the money has been made with contributions from the Class Fund of 1908. In two years' time we hope to be able to install the first of our cases as a gift from '08, '09, and '10.

It is true that we have at the present moment the balance of a sum voted us last year by the Athletic Committee, which could be spent in providing a case. But it has seemed best to hold this fund in reserve. The banners now hanging in the Trophy Room are fast falling to pieces. No banner will last more than a few years unless some means of preserving it by a varnish or coating of some sort can be devised. For the last two years we have been in negotiation with an expert at the Art Museum, and some of the banners are now in his hands for treatment. Owing to the experimental nature of the work, and the press of other business, the affair has progressed very slowly. But the Committee has thought it best to wait two or three years if necessary in hopes that the experiment will succeed, rather than commit itself to the only other alternative, the preservation of the banners between sheets of glass,--an alternative which is expensive, necessitates the taking down of the banners altogether, and may at any moment be proved to have been foolish and unnecessary. It is for the purpose of going on with the work of preserving the banners, as soon as the experiments warrant, that we are reserving this surplus fund. Taken all in all, then, I do not think that we are as black as your correspondent paints us. At the same time I welcome his criticism for the excuse it gives me to put the aims of the Trophy Room Committee before the College. It gives point, too, to the old adage that it is well to look before you leap.  B. A. G. FULLER '00