Dean Hurlbut Reviews Illustrated

Three articles in the April number of The Harvard Illustrated Magazine, Mr. Clapp's, Mr. McKenna's, and Mr. Groton's, are likely to secure the attention not only of Harvard graduates and undergraduates but of other readers. Lovers of "the national game" will doubtless turn first to Mr. McKenna's "Baseball Outlook for 1907", a compact and concise statement of the conditions at Yale and Princeton, and a sanguine analysis of those at Harvard. If Mr. McKenna is right,--and that he is, is devoutly to be wished,--Harvard men may conclude their reading with a sigh of satisfaction, and, like the Coach, need lose on sleep. To one who for several years has not road closely the baseball columns of the daily papers, this article shows the amazing rapidity of growth possible in the technical language of a popular sport. Start who knock holes in batting averages are hold friends; a "comer" who "has a long way to come" and even the divagations of a star, who, though assured that he "cannot be-touched," nevertheless "worries himself wild," and toward the middle of the game "goes up in the air and stays there," are understandable; but those conditions at Yale that do not favor a pitcher's arm, give then uninitiated cause for meditation.

Mr. Clapp's "Behind the Scenes at Memorial Hall" is entertaining and useful: it might will be employed by the Secretary of the University to answer the many parents of incoming students who are agitated on the subject of "board", An ampler history of that foundation dining club ("Thayer Commons", not the Mayer Club) and that "one-story wooden building on the site of the present Law School", which began life as a frivolous railroad station (the "terminal" of the road which ran out to the willows on Holmes Field and stopped there) and by some is reported to be passing a respectable old age as a stable for the President's horses, would have made the article still more interesting. The illustrations are well chosen: the "old boys" who sat at the high table in the Hall where Lawton manoeuvred for the extra glass of port might not disdain this great hall; and the pictures of the old and new serving rooms and the new kitchen show more clearly than can words the great change that enables one now at any time happily to undertake that journey which in the old days only the curious dared, and they only at a considerable interval before a meal.

In "Recent Graduates as Men of Lectures" Mr. Groton discusses appreciatively the younger generation of Harvard writers, and furnishes a convincing refutation of the thesis that the teaching of English composition in Harvard College has not served to develop men of letters. The men enumerated there, as well as many of a few years earlier,--Hammond Lamont, Charles M. Thompson, Mark Howe, William Morton Fullerton, to name but a few,--men who are succeeding, were taught in Harvard College, and here, as editors of our College papers, first really tried their hand.