Communication.

Editors Daily Crimson:

A communication appeared in the CRIMSON yesterday attacking the man agreement of the freshman crew. If there had not been a similar attack in your editorial column. I think that after the events of the past winter, I should not be justified in noticing it. For the benefit of others, however, I will say that early in the year, Captain Kidder asked me to coach his crew, alleging that he was having some difficulty in getting men to help him. Finally, Mr. Carpenter and I assisted him in laying out a plan for the work of his crew. One feature of that plan is slow rowing in barges. Aside from the fact that during the first few weeks on the river, any man has all he can attend to in handling his oar properly in and out of the water even while rowing easily, racing in barges is about as good practice for a crew as racing in rubber boots would be for sprint-runners. Barges are only necessary evils, and when a crew has its "form" well fixed, it had better get into a shell at once; until then, racing and rushing only serve to develop more faults, particularly in the case of a freshman crew. Of course, this is merely an opinion, but it is founded on several years' observation and experience in my own class crew, which met with some success; that opinion has also been strengthened by talks with prominent Yale rowing men, who may be presumed to know what they were talking about.

Some men in college who have rowed a year or two with tolerable success, assume, for some totally unsupportable reason, that because we are working slowly and carefully, we are working against the interests of the University crew. We are not. There is but one time to determine what stroke a crew is rowing, and that is during the race: different individuals often use different methods in teaching precisely the same stroke. Those methods, to, will depend largely upon the men in the boat and their tendency to fall into faults.

The events of Friday may be explained by the fact that the freshmen had orders tomorrow very easily, because they had a hard row on Thursday and were expected to take a long one on Saturday. The University crew, I am told, were rowing as hard as they could.

Yours, W. ALEXANDER.