If there is any one thing we may derive from President Lowell's annual report, printed in full in a supplement this morning, it is a conception of Harvard, the University. If there is another, it is a comprehension of the ideal of service which the University is pursuing. And if a third, turning particularly to the college, a clear presentation of the aims of the new Freshman dormitories and a discussion of the three and the three and a half year course.

For a full appreciation of the size and complexity of the University, we must look over the sheaf of annual reports (too voluminous to be printed here) presented to the Board of Overseers at its last meeting. Here we find the statements of thirty-four separate official departments, from that of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to that of the Medical School Bureau of Appointments. It would be well for those who know only their own department, or at the most their own and two or three others, to ponder on the fact that the official work of the University is divided into thirty-four branches, of which the College is only one; and then to think of the multitudinous student activities, formal and informal, and the five thousand individuals who go to make up Harvard. Is there any wonder that no satisfactorily comprehensive impression of it has ever been written? It demands more than an every-day confessions for the man who shall write its Comedie Humaine.

The particular works of public service mentioned in the report are those of co-operation with Technology in Engineering and Health Schools, and the changed admission requirements of the Medical Schools. Much has been said of the first already. In the second we find one of the chief reasons for the change, the duty of the Medical School in opening its remarkable clinical advantages to as wide a representation of medical students as possible.

For the undergraduate department, there is a passage on Freshman dormitories which everyone and particularly the opponents of the plan should read and digest. Of course the question of its value is one which will never be entirely settled; but on one side there stands the argument, far outweighing the cry against it as the end of Harvard individualism, that "By being brought at once into the compact body of the class they (the Freshmen) can be placed in a large stream of college life flowing in a larger channel than any smaller group they meet today." And then there is the matter of graduating in three or three and a half years, In addition to President Lowell's observations, one other argument, to sentiment, may be advanced--the pleasure and value of Senior year in the Yard as testified to by the classes who have known it.