CORRESPONDENCE.

MARBURG, March 28, 1877.

TO THE EDITORS OF THE CRIMSON: -

I HAVE before me the Crimson of March 9th, which contains a complaint as to the ventilation of certain recitation-rooms. This immediately puts me in mind of the state of things existing in one of the greatest Universities of Germany. The writer has complained that "in one case some thirty men have been compelled to sit for an hour in a small room with closed doors and windows." In one of the large halls in the University of Leipzig more than two hundred students are gathered together to listen to the learned Professor Curtius, whose fame is now world-wide. Here I have repeatedly sat during the hottest days of July, when not a single one of the dozen large windows was ever opened. And there we had to sit and breathe, however much we might feel that the wise things the lecturer was saying were reaching our ears through a poisoned medium. Though an attempt was made on the part of Americans to admit the pure air, Professor Curtius was petitioned by the Germans to allow the windows to remain closed. In winter the case is still worse, and at the end of the hour the American student, who has been used to better things at home, rushes to the window to get a gasp of pure ether. Unhappy is the man who must sit in the same room for the following hour. Not only has the good air been exhausted, but the evil has been increased in another important respect. As elegance of dress and personal cleanliness are rare traits of the German student, the odor that one perceives on entering, at the end of the hour, a large room that has been filled with students can better be imagined than described. to be sure, during the pause of the "Akademisches Viertel" the doors and some of the windows are thrown open for a few minutes; yet during that time the bad air is not all removed. And it sometimes really seems as though the German student, were he quite by his own countrymen without the presence of foreigners, would willingly and with perfect content sit in this atmosphere of poison, without once thinking of opening a window.

I mention these facts, not from any wish to prove that the "bad air" of our Harvard recitation-rooms is of no account, but rather to show that there are students who can put up with a state of things that to us, fortunately, is intolerable. Happily our "shady side" is not that we live "hermetically sealed."

A. F. W.