ON ALBUMS

Tomorrow there will go on sale the 1929 issue of the Harvard Aubum, which immortalizes the various literary efforts of elected poets. Besides this service it will also afford a birdseye view of the members of the Senior class, from the man who was in college one year as an undergraduate to the distinguished individual who lists five sports and innumerable committee and executive positions. Of the man who spent his four years in conscientious searching after truth and gradual strengthening of the fibres of his character there will be little more to be seen than of those who toiled not but spun in perhaps ever decreasing circles.

There was a time before the glories of modern printing had penetrated to the lives of even the humblest inhabitants, when each man wrote in his own hand a short autobiography to be filed with others in his class. Like other matters in and around Cambridge when Harvard had an enrolment of five hundred or thereabouts, there was more of the personal touch, more perhaps of humanism than is contained in modern Albums. And the man who had slowly developed from the inside could leave a record fully as illuminating to posterity as he who found his personality by contact with the whirring of the world outside him.

But modern science has given to modern Albums a means of description and narration which has also been aptly capitalized by the present daily press. There are pictures, more technically perhaps, cuts in the modern class compendiums, and the graduate who journeys to Singapore can refresh himself of an evening with views of the Yard, of the crew captain, and even of himself before his hair fell. Externals again perhaps but they are elements of importance in the memories which give color to a college education.

The Album has certainly kept abreast of the times and though the list of variations on the theme of "depression upon leaving Harvard College" has been pretty well exhausted in bygone odes, hymns, and other poetic tributes there will always be a place for a publication which affords a handy reference book to College as I knew it.