1925 ALBUM MARKS DEFINITE ADVANCE

The following review of the Senior Album, issued today, was written for the Crimson by David T. W. McCord '21. Mr. McCord, who was Ivy Orator for his class and was president of the Lampoon, is now connected with the Alumni Bulletin and the Transcript.

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To the Senior in Harvard College the publication of the Class Album has come to be an event with perhaps a bit more of sentiment in it than attaches to the formality of receiving a degree. It is not strange. The whole record of those four years, insofar as it can be photographed and walled up in sentences and paragraphs, is collected between the covers, and to give the Album a place on even the dustiest shelf is to possess, when it was richest, a corner of the Yard.

Album Has Expanded Greatly

In recent years the Album has expanded enormously. This is partly due to the steady growth in class enrolment, and partly to a gradual enlargement of the volume's scope. To compass the material about the class of 1925 it has taken exactly twenty pages more than were needed for the 1922 Album.

To each class, of course, its own Album is the best and the most satisfactory. As a matter of fact, this is strictly true, and each successive Album is almost always better than its predecessor; for in it are incorporated the most significant merits of the preceding volumes and the mistakes (there are always some) appear for the most part original.

More than any recent Album editors, the 1925 committee, of which Joe de Ganahl is the chairman, has made some very definite advances in the composition of their book. It is surprising how many, for in the College market the wares of this sort for the last few years have been considered very good. It is not hard to enumerate them: That beneficent Rogue's Gallery, the gallery of photographs of the Faculty, has for the first time been divided (as it should be) according to Divisions and Departments instead of following the old order of straight alphabetical progression. Most important of all, scholarship has found adequate recognition, and Phi Beta Kappa, the Rank List for the first three years of the class, and Mr. Hammond's article on the subject are grouped together.

A number of graduates have contributed articles. Lawrence Shaw Mayo '10, an admirable and comprehensive account of the growth and development of the Yard; Delmar Leighton '19, "Studies and the Choice of Vocations"; Francis L. Higginson Jr. '00, "The Future of the Class" which deals in brief with such pleasant things as graduate organizations, publications, Harvard Clubs, and reunions (almost all of which, unfortunately, cost money).

The photographs of buildings, the Yard, etc., many of which have appeared in other Albums, include a number of new and extremely artistic ones. Here, too, is a new arrangement, and the dormitories are now grouped according to the years in which they were built. For the rest, it is the essential Album, the record of a Harvard generation, of which the Senior alone has the true appreciation. There are minor defects, but not to be quibbled over. And if there is one thing on which the Committee is to be especially congratulated it is the fact that the 1925 Album is dedicated to Dean Briggs, who will retire at the end of this academic year; Dean Briggs, "whose friendship, sympathy, and understanding have inspired twelve College generations and whose ideals will be tradition for those to come.