The Baccalaureate Service for the Class of 1999, conducted in Memorial Church yesterday afternoon, was a short, light-hearted and sweltering prelude to the official Commencement exercises to be held tomorrow.

Snatches of humor and farewells to Radcliffe dominated the event, the last at which Radcliffe will be represented as a college.

"Greetings, warm greetings," quipped Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson to the assembled crowd.

As temperatures climbed well into the 90s, seniors packed Memorial Church--filing in took more than 15 minutes--while their families and friends listened from Tercentenary Theater.

In her speech, Wilson referred to Commencement as a "triple-header," as both the seniors, Radcliffe College and Wilson herself will soon be moving on.

"You and I are going away, hopefully to visit often, but Radcliffe is moving in for good," Wilson said.

University President Neil L. Rudenstine also paid tribute to Radcliffe, calling upon all female graduates and Wilson herself to stand and be recognized at the beginning of his speech.

"Women of Radcliffe, you follow in the line of distinguished graduates stretching back over a century," Rudenstine said.

Rudenstine also lauded the women's hockey team, which earned a national championship this past winter.

"Women have never been so triumphant in so many of our gladiatorial arenas," he said.

But Rudenstine warned the crowd not to grow complacent in fighting for women's rights, saying "much, much more needs to be done."

"Keep it up, don't slow down, don't give in an inch," he said.

Rudenstine also used the issue of women's rights as a launching point for some humorous digs at all males, The Harvard Crimson, and University administrators.

He lamented the plight of "unfortunate males" with their "delusions of adequacy," and chided The Crimson--"that fountain of infallibility, source of effable and ineffable truth [and] arguably the best campus daily"--for calling the prospect of co-education "ridiculous" in an editorial published earlier this century. He even touched on the "universal urge to merge," which drove fear into the hearts of Harvard's male administrators.

Seniors in the audience said they appreciated Rudenstine's humor.