The difference in spirit is as great as the difference in numbers. In America, the sole idea in athletics, as is proclaimed again and again, is to beat the rival team. No concession is made to the comfort or wholesomeness of the sport; men are induced to train by the excellent if somewhat grandiose sentiment that they owe it to the university to make every possible sacrifice of personal pleasure. Our class crews, which have long ceased to represent any real class rivalry, are maintained mainly in the hope of producing 'varsity material. The result of these two systems is curiously at variance with the intention. At Oxford, where rowing is very pleasant indeed, and where for the greater part of the year the main interest centres in college crews, the 'varsity reaches a high degree of perfection, and the oarsmen, without quite being aware of the fact, represent their university very creditably; while at Yale, and until recently at Harvard, the subsidiary crews have been comparative failures in producing material, and the 'varsity is in consequence somewhat in the position of an exotic, being kept alive merely by the stimulus of inter-varsity rivalry. The recent improvement at Harvard is due to Mr. Rudolph C. Lehmann, the celebrated Cambridge and Leander oar who coached the Harvard crews of 1897 and 1898, in the sportsmanlike endeavor to stimulate a broader and more expert interest in boating. His failure to bring either of the crews to victory, which to so many of us signified the utter failure of his mission, has had more than a sufficient compensation in the fact that he established at Harvard something like the English boating system. Anything strictly similar to the torpids and eights is of course out of the question, because we have no social basis such as the colleges afford for rivalry in boating; but the lack of colleges has in a measure been remedied by creating a factitious rivalry between improvised boating clubs, and the system of torpids and eights has been crudely imitated in the so-called graded crews. A season of preliminary racing has thus been established, on the basis of which the candidates for the 'varsity crew are now selected, so that instead of the nine months of slogging in the tank and on the river, in which the more nervous and highly organized candidates were likely to succumb and the stolid men to find a place in the boat, the eight is made up as at Oxford of those who have shown to best advantage in a series of spirited races. Crude as the new Harvard system is as compared with the English system, it has already created a true boating spirit, and has trained a large body of men in the established stroke, placing the sport at Harvard on a sounder basis than at any other American university. It has thus been of infinitely more advantage, by the potentiality of an example, than any number of victories at New London. To realize the full benefit of the system of