Pennsylvania Letter

Interest at the University of Pennsylvania continues to centre about the opening of the new law school building on February 21. Justice Harlan of the U. S. Supreme Court and Professor Ames will be among the speakers at the dedication. Invitations have been accepted by over a hundred representatives of universities and legal associations. The building, which is nearly ready for occupancy, contains a hall for the debating union, to be named Price Hall in honor of one of the donors.

On Washington's Birthday the usual "University Day" celebration will take place, including an academic procession from the university to the Academy of Music, and addresses by distinguished speakers. Wu Ting Fang, the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, who has showed himself a gifted speaker, will deliver the principal address, and will prove an unusual attraction at the exercises.

The annual Catalogue has lately been issued, showing the total number of students in the university to be 2673, divided as follows: The college, 706; medical school, 682; law school, 312; graduate school, 172. There is an increasing number of students from Latin-American countries due, in part, to circulars of information regarding the university recently translated into Spanish and circulated in Central and South America and the West Indies.

The Provost's report acknowledges gifts received during the past year amounting to something over $600,000, and discusses the relation of undergraduate and graduate courses. Heretofore graduates have been barred from courses intended for college students except in a very few cases, and there is a growing demand for a class of courses like those at Harvard intended "for graduates and undergraduates." The chief difficulty lies in the objection to admitting the women in the graduate school to college courses.

The team for the Michigan debate, to be held here in March, has been chosen and is busily at work. There will probably be no second debate this year because Cornell has declined to renew the agreement under which debates have been held for the past six years, owing to the refusal of Pennsylvania to agree to a clause prohibiting the choice of debaters until they should have been in the university for a full year. Both Cornell and Pennsylvania are to have a series of debates with Columbia, instead of with each other.

The new Museum of Science and Art, which was lately dedicated and opened to the public, is going to prove useful by affording space, in its roomy halls and corridors, for large social gatherings such as public receptions and faculty teas, for which hitherto no satisfactory place has been available.

Two new periodicals have lately been started by the students. One, a small weekly paper called "The Examiner", devoted to the criticism in a satirical vein of all manner of undergraduate evils, has already appeared. The other, which is still in preparation, is to be of a humorous character, like the Yale Record and the Lampoon. Another publication of interest to Pennsylvania men is the volume of "Pennsylvania Stories" lately issued, written by Arthur Hobson Quinn '94, who is now an instructor in the college. These stories treat of life at the University of Pennsylvania, after the manner of similar volumes of Harvard and Princeton stories, and they have already passed into a third edition.