Reading period is many different things to different people. For some it provides time to pursue individual academic interests. For many others it is essentially a cram session. And for a few it actually is what it was designed to be--a time for doing course assignments specifically reserved for these lectureless days.

For the athletes, however, reading period is traveling time. It means packing the sweaty dufflebags and heading off for games in far away places. Thus the track team will make trips to both Dartmouth and Navy in the next five days. And the baseball team will, by this weekend, have completed a series of four lengthy jaunts (and one shorter one) in the space of two weeks.

But the baseball team seems to have a special problem. It's not just that they've been forced to travel a lot: what's more disturbing is the fact that the time and money devoted to sending them away has, in effect, been wasted. And, it would seem, needlessly so......,

A week ago last Saturday the baseballers flew to Navy for a game that was subsequently rained out, Four days later the same thing happened--with the one difference that the destination and opponent was in this latter case, Cornell.

Round-trip plane tickets to the fair cities of Annapolis and Ithaca sell for something like 50 dollars. The varsity's travelling list usually comprises about twenty men. Add incidentals, and the total outlay for these fruitless ventures comes to upwards of one thousand bills apiece.

The Cornell trip, in particular,--and the waste of time and money that it involved--seems to have been quite unnecessary. The day on which the affair was scheduled dawned rainy and cold in both Ithaca and Cambridge. Local weather forecasts in the two cities offered no hope of rapid improvement in these conditions.

Over at the H.A.A. that morning some voices were raised against embarking on a journey which appeared so unlikely to result in a baseball game. But the counsels of higher officials prevailed. Their argument apparently went roughly as follows...

Negotiations for a postponement are customarily set in motion by the home team. Thus Harvard must go to Cornell, unless Cornell should call Harvard and advise otherwise. It would be out of order for the H.A.A. to phone Ithaca. Precedent must be preserved.

And so it was. The varsity took off for Cornell; and, immediately upon arriving, was told what one and all expected to hear--that a game that day was just out of the question.

One cannot help but feel that all this might easily have been averted. A little willingness to sacrifice precedent and a small investment in a phone call to Ithaca early Wednesday morning might well have done the trick. One dollar might have saved a thousand.

In a larger sense, it might be wise not to undertake lengthy trips, if game conditions at the host campus are at all uncertain. We are not sure, from our relatively uninformed vantage-point, just what the answer to all this is: but we would be very surprised if there were no answer at all.