A correspondent, his hands stained with chemicals and his brow furrowed, informs us of a lecture he was constrained to hear in the bowels of Mallinckrodt, where is is taking an elementary chemistry course. The icy and drab instructor, he tells us, confronted his shivering students one afternoon with a more than usually bellicose air. "You are to take all readings in the laboratory in your notebooks," he said. "You are not to make notations on any other paper, of any sort. If you do, it will be to your disadvantage; the assistants have been instructed to take all miscellaneous notes on scratch paper they find on your desks and throw them away."

We wonder if the spirits of some of Harvard's great men, and educators ever visit the Chemical buildings; we wonder what they think.

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Another of the delightful tales of the regimentation in the Chemistry department concerns the mechanism for seeing that desks are left clean. The students are informed with great emphasis that they must wash their desks after they have finished work. But this information is not all. They are also told that if they fail to wash a desk, a note reminding them of that fact will be slipped into their desks by an assistant. A duplicate note will be sent the office, whence will emanate toward the presumably terrified offender a letter, couched in solemn, hortatory tones. This entire process constitutes a "first warning." This, however, is but the beginning. If the unfortunate student repeats the offence, if he leave even one tiny stain on the expanse of his handsome desk, he is summarily excluded from the lab for three weeks or so, and forced to make up the missed work as best he can. As the instructor coyly remarks, after issuing this information: "only once have we had hard feeling because of this necessary provision."

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These drab stories bring us quite naturally to the Philosophy Department. It seems that one day not long ago, a student entered a section in Philosophy 1a, totally and blindly unprepared, and found himself faced with a quiz. The question demanded an account of parallelism and interactionalism. These words the student had never seen. But he knew something of the ways of the thinkers. He constructed an elaborate and circumstantial grouping of ambiguities, with frequent mention of the two words in the question. Then he handed in his paper, and walked away, somewhat down in the mouth. When the paper was handed back, he was astonished to perceive that it had received a grade of nine out of a possible ten; the figure nine, he affirms, was written in a puzzled and trembling hand.