CROWDED LABORATORIES

From the lengthening shadow cast by the huge new Chemistry Laboratory as it nears completion come the pleas of the kindred departments of Zoology, Botany, and Physiology where the equipment and building are quite as inadequate as the facilities in Boylston Hall. In a letter in the current Alumni Bulletin Dr. Parker acknowledges that the recent reports of conditions in the Department of Biology have not been overdrawn, and describes the efforts that are being made to remedy the situation. The Departments of Zoology and Botany, he reports, have increased ten-fold in sizee, both in the number of students and of instructors; the Department of General Physiology has been added; the Bussey Institute, the Museums and Herbariums have increasingly extended their activities; and yet the buildings which these occupy have not been materially changed or improved in the last forty-five years.

This great and universally recognized need of an increase in housing and facilities, and of the centralization of the University's biological activities has moved President Lowell to establish a committee headed by Professor Ames to consider the possibilities of improvement. The plans for a biological center have been readily evolved, and have been approved by President Lowell, but the inevitable need of money prevents any further advance in reorganization.

In a university of the size of Harvard it is unpreventable that the progression of the various Departments should display a broken line of advance. But it is also singularly unfortunate that the departments where practical demonstration and experiment, and consequently the equipment, are of paramount importance, should be the very ones to lag, that a depressing lack of facilities should hamper the investigation of an exceptionally capable body of research specialists whose work is, paradoxically, as commercial as it is cultural in its value. The increasing need which the scientific departments feel for equipment which may keep them abreast of progress, makes the University's inability to satisfy this need understandable, but it makes even more urgent the necessity of generous contributions which may enable biologic enterprise at Harvard to realize its fullest possibilities.