To Prevent Conflict of Lecture Date.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your editorial in this morning's CRIMSON suggests a "clearing-house" for dates of lectures and addresses in order to avoid conflicts. It should be more widely known than it evidently is that such a clearing-house has been in existence for several years, and that an official engagement book is kept in the Recorder's office. Should all those interested in arranging the dates of lectures and entertainments consult this book in advance doubtless some conflicts would be avoided; but such is the diversity of interests at Harvard that it is not always undesirable to have several of these attractions on the same evening. This aspect of the situation is well illustrated in the following paragraph in Dean Briggs's "Harvard and the Individual":

"A story told by Professor Palmer and afterward printed by Mr. E. S. Martin reveals the divided interests of Harvard. On the evening of a mass meeting in Massachusetts Hall for the discussion of some point in the athletic relations between Harvard and Yale. Professor Palmer went to Sever Hall, where Mr. David A. Wells was to lecture on banking; and as he went he was troubled by the thought that "those boys" would all be in Massachusetts Hall, and that Mr. Wells would have no audience. Arriving at the lecture hall, which seats over four hundred persons, he found standing-room only; and it was not Cambridge women that filled the seats--it was Harvard students. After the lecture, remembering that there should be that evening a meeting of the Classical Club, he went to the top of Stoughton Hall to find there between twenty and thirty men, who, oblivious alike of banking and of Yale, had spent the evening in a discussion of Homeric Philology. "Harvard indifference," says one critic; "Harvard University," says another."  CHARLES S. MOORE,  Assistant Recorder