Harvard Habits.

Reports of a somewhat vague and inconclusive nature come from Harvard University to the effect that there is less smoking and pool-playing, and less purchasing of reading matter as well. The returns are from the Harvard Union, and they may simply be taken to indicate a decline in the patronage of that large and democratic social organization. But the Union is representative of the undergraduate microcosm. Life in the larger world is more serious than it was before August, 1914. "The cigarette," wrote George Frederick Watts, "is the handmaid of idleness," and the diminishing consumption of cigarettes may mean that Harvard less faithfully answers the often quoted definition of the visiting Chinese savant who wrote, "They have a large athletic club here named Harvard. On days when it rains the students read books"; or the famous description of Artemus Ward that Harvard College was "pleasantly located in the bar-room of Parker's." Life in time may become as rigorous as it was when the snow filtered through the roof of Massachusetts Hall, ice was cracked for matutinal ablutions and beer and soggy biscuits were the breakfast food. The declining use of purchased literature perhaps means increasing dependence on the wonderful collection of books the University has made, and a general inclination to select the courses that are of a manual as well as mental nature, realizing the ideal of Dr. Eliot, who said that he would not rest content till most of the studies called on the student to use his hands as well as his head. --Philadelphia Public Ledger.