Everyone who has to draw sustinance from University dining halls has given up asking questions long ago. But the parade of ice cream flavors appearing every week still has him baffled. Some of those on the receiving end of this plethora are convinced that the dining hall department is using them as a testing ground for strange new experiments. Others assert that an old eccentric gentleman left an endowment to provide all future students with his favorite ice creams--peanut brittle, cherry cocoanut, and macaroon.

This is no truer than the claim that the Boston Lying-in Hospital has an endowment to provide champagne for expectant mothers. Whatever champagne the Hospital does dole out is like Harvard's flavor parade, "compliments of the house." Harvard and Radcliffe have no endowments for food or drink of any sort.

Still others suspect the Dining Hall Department of unscrupulous motives. They think the Department buys left-overs in unpopular flavors to get lower rates. This could not be so, because in wholesale quantities (the University bought 57,615 gallons last year) all flavors cost the same. Nor is the University trying to encourage the Hoods production department's search for new varieties in the hope of finding a formula everyone likes. It is merely trying to break the monotony of the meals.

In this it has been partially successful; at many meals the experimental ice creams have been by far the most popular topic of meal-time conversation. When, after the "brown-bread flavor's" first appearance, Director of Dining Halls Heaman heard one of these discussions, he vowed he would never serve that flavor again. Nevertheless, every time he strolls past Howard Johnson's he can be proud of himself. He boasts 32 flavors, and they have only 26.