The motto "Occasionem Cognosce," which is inscribed above the main gate of Lowell House at Cambridge, will serve as an adequate and fitting memorial to the foresight of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell in undertaking the establishment of the Harvard house plan, the most significant of the achievements of a brilliant academic career. For President Lowell has never more surely seen his opportunity and acted upon it than when he enlisted the sympathies and generosity of Edward S. Harkness.

Now the house plan is a reality. The opposition to the innovation, which was by no means negligible, has subsided before the determination of the university head, and the minor episodes which have at times threatened its harmonious accomplishment are things of the past More than five hundred young men of Harvard are in actual residence in Dunster and Lowell Houses, and the academic world will scrutinize closely the initial endeavors of a Harvard in transition.

President Lowell and Dean Greenough have embarked upon their project in the belief that harmonious surroundings are in themselves a furtherance of the humanistic aims to which the house plan is dedicated. The results that may be expected in this direction can be estimated only by those who have actually seen the tranquil beauty of Dunster House on the banks of the Charles and the cloistered dignity of the central court of Lowell House. That some little formalism of manner and management in the units should be borrowed from the older universities of an older country is entirely fitting. Dons and high tables and the amenities of cultivated existence are in keeping with a scheme of decoration dominated by Copleys and Gilbert Stuarts.

It is well known that the house plan has been the ultimate goal toward which President Lowell has steered his course during his twenty years of leadership. No one who has seen him as, accompanied by his inevitable spaniel, he has made his daily rounds of the building under construction, or, heedless of the whizzing traffic, surveyed the rising towers from the middle of the Riverway, can doubt that of all aims and endeavors the quadrangle system lies nearest to his heart. If any monument to President Lowell may be required by future generations, the spires on the Cambridge skyline will serve the purpose. Herald Tribune.