Pictures of girls in broad brimmed hats and students sauntering through the Yard arrayed in cut-always and stove pipe hats have finally furnished a clue to the age of the china plate fragments discovered Friday afternoon in the steard pipe ditch being constructed near University Hall. More than a bushed of broken 'ups, plates, and bowls were taken out of this mine of ancient University plate accidentaly unearthed by the operations of a steam shoved. The plate having been rescued from eternal oblivion by the enthusiastic and opportune intervention of President Lowell has been carefully scrutinized by Assistant Professor K. J. Conant, of the department of Fine Arts, in conjunction with President Lowell, and an estimate of its real age has placed it somewhere in the forties or fifties of the last century.
The majority of the sceres depicted are simply representations of former Harvard buildings, but in some of the designs there are also figures of men and women and the dress of the latter has been tire most conclusive element in fixing the date of the relics around the middle of the last century. The heard gear of the women, is at least as late as that of the forties while the absence of that of the forties while the absence of hoop skirts shows that the period could not have been much later.
The plate unearthed Friday derives more than an antiquarian interest from the fact that the border designs found on it are to bet transmitted to the new University plate, on the design for which Assistant Professor Conant was already it work at the time of the recent discovery. The projected plate will have no specific use but it is expected that it will be adopted in a larger number of Harvard Clubs and will probably be used in the University dining hall if one is constructed next year.
The mystery which at first surrounded the deposit of so large an amount of china in the center of the Yard was largely dissipated last night by the discovery that previous to the construction of Appleton Chapel and the old Gore Half Library all of the Yard cast of University Hall was a barren waste. The part immediately behind University I was evidently used as a dump heap which accounts for the presence of the broken cups and plates there.
