LIBRARY LIGHTS.

EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON: Word comes from the library that the project of lighting it by electricity has been definitely given up by a vote of the corporation. Almost money enough had been raised, but, at the last minute, the corporation has refused its assent. To those interested in the welfare of the library, and in its usefulness to the students, such conduct seems inexplicable. It is true that the corporation is reported to have failed to see that the use of the library in the evening would be of any advantage, and that because they did not care for a lighted library when they were in college, no one now needs it. Such notions, however, may satisfy the corporation, but not the students. The present temper of the latter is wholly indifferent as to whether the corporation used to perfer squalor and darkness or not. What they want, or, at least, what 90 per cent. of those who use the library want, is a library that is open, as much of the day as libraries are ordinarily opened, and is light enough at all times for comfortable reading.

I suppose that the corporation were in college when few students used the library. Now the number has increased, as President Eliot says with pride in his report, to 90 per cent. Argument, therefore, from such precedent as the corporation can furnish is not satisfactory.

As for the danger to the books from fire, I may say that the present state of electrical science is such as to make it highly improbably that the Harvard College library is the only place on the face of the earth which cannot be lighted safely by electricity.

E. G. S.