THE SCHOOL OF GEOGRAPHY

In harmony both with the spiritual and physical development of the Harvard University of the third decade in the twentieth century, the latest addition to the University's scientific buildings, the School of Geography, will be a separate and integral laboratory devoted to science and built in the Georgian manner.

In the past years Geography has been more a name than an institution at Harvard. Such isolated courses as Geography 1, faintly reminiscent of the odium of a "snap", have fallen to the lot of a conspicuous minority of undergraduates. Geography as a study is only too often a memory of the fifth-grade.

Under the new plans which call for actual instruction by September 1931, the old order changeth. A library of 80,000 volumes, including the Humhoidt expeditions 130 years ago, and undoubtedly the report of Admiral Byrd's explorations at the South Pole, will grace one part of the building. Modern geography is closely allied to all other sciences. The research at the universities in Holland, and at Cambridge and Oxford, the close connection with the City Planning Institutes both abroad and at home, the social and spiritual features of widely separated peoples over the face of the globe are merely a few of the modern phenomena dependent on geography.

The new department will of course be an invaluable aid to the numerous scientific explorations of the University. In a larger sense it may be construed as merely another sign of the continuous efforts of Harvard to keep pace with the modern world. To Doctor Rice, founder, donor and director of the School of Geography, Harvard owes a debt of gratitude which can only inadequately be expressed verbally.