WHEN IS A WORD?

"Economics A. Professors Taussig and Burbank. 250 miles. 260 meters. 20 feet. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 11, static permitting."

So the announcement of courses may read at a not distant date if present developments in radio telephony and reading continue. At the same time that individual wireless receivers are spring up on all ears to catch the music and the speeches in the air, Rear Admiral Fiske has invented a Reading Machine which enables a man to carry "the Government of England" in his vest pocket. Strips of paper bearing microscopic characters are passed by the operator of the machine under a magnifying glass powerful enough to permit comfortable reading. So vast is the saving of paper effected by this process that 10,000 copies of an ordinary novel could be printed, it is claimed, for four cents each.

Of course, this invention and the wireless phone will revolutionize educational methods. Everyone will own a complete library in his field and will carry it about with him in a Boston bag. Strips of reading will be catalogued by number, like phonograph records, and assignments will be made by number and by the foot. The lecture-room will naturally fall into the limbo of the past as lectures, each at a different wavelength, are broadcasted from the professor's study to students in outlying cities within a specified radius. Examinations, however, will flourish no less hardily, for the otherwise untrammeled absentees will be made to answer questions and submit reports by the telautograph. Verily "The old orde--splut-- -- --." Even the athletes will be emancipated when wirelessly-controlled automata follow the instructions of inviable--but not abolished--coaches, Then indeed will Harvard tradition be renowned; nothing else of Harvard will survive.