FIRE TO FRYING-PAN

From the recent mushroom growth of Harvard recollections, it is evident that the University is not to be allowed to forget that "You are old, Father William", and furthermore that there have been ravages as well as advances during the aging process. Dean Donham, in an interesting study of how the times have changed, numbers among the ravages the introduction of the fearful cafeteria. Granting that this soul-killing institution does devastate many a good, home-bred stomach, there be defenders who may well argue that it is better to snatch and run at a cafeteria, than to snatch elsewhere and not be inclined or able to run. The pre-one-arm-chair days have not an unsmirched history. Their graces, sung oblivious to the facts, are those with which time seems to invest almost everything.

After all if the doctrine of heredity holds water, the present cafeteria "hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar." As a proof, not much after 1636 one finds that "Beer and bread are the standard breakfast foods both frequently sour," according to a recent Harvard historian,--who also goes on to mention that an "Indian was generally the scullion." Thus one realizes that the present day quasi-barbaric dish is ineradicably rooted in hoary traditions. The staple winter diet at that time was salt meat, followed often by "pye." At a later period an Oxoulan wrote of us that. "There was much complaint about the quality of the food and cookery," and in 1791 it is reported by another chronicler that "diluted milk" was served, and that students desirous of postponing the examinations of the following day, "put a tartar emetic in the coffee boilers." It is quite evident that there have been grounds for complaint throughout the centuries, and that the cafeteria is not, in the end, such a come down.