The fraternities are admirably organized. The usual system comprises a legislative body made up of delegates from the different chapters and an executive or administrative body elected by the delegates. Few of the fraternities have any judiciary. None is needed. The financial systems are sound, and the conventions of delegates meet in various parts of the United States, several hundred in number, spend thousands of dollars in travel and entertainment, and attract much public attention. Most of the fraternities have an inspection system by which chapters are periodically visited and kept up to a certain level of excellence. The leading fraternities publish journals usually from four to eight times during the college year. The earliest of these was the _Beta Theta Pi_, first issued in 1872. All publish catalogues of their members and the most prosperous have issued histories. They also publish song books, music and many ephemeral and local publications. The alumni of the fraternities are organized into clubs or associations having headquarters at centres of population. These organizations are somewhat loose, but nevertheless are capable of much exertion and influence should occasion arise. The college fraternity system has no parallel among the students of colleges outside of America. One of the curious things about it, however, is that while it is practically uniform throughout the United States, at the three prominent universities of Harvard, Yale and Princeton it differs in many respects from its character elsewhere. At Harvard, although there are chapters of a few of the fraternities, their influence is insignificant, their place being taken by a group of local societies, some of them class organizations. At Yale, the regular system of fraternities obtains in the engineering or technical department (the Sheffield Scientific School), but in the classical department the fraternity chapters are called "junior" societies, because they limit their membership to the three upper classes and allow the juniors each year practically to control the chapter affairs. Certain senior societies, of which the oldest is the Skull and Bones, which are inter-fraternity societies admitting freely members of the fraternities, are more prominent at Yale than the fraternities themselves. Princeton has two (secret) literary and fraternal societies, the American Whig and the Cliosophic, and various local social clubs, with no relationship to organizations in other colleges and not having Greek letter names. At a few universities (for instance, Michigan, Cornell and Virginia), senior societies or other inter-fraternity societies exert great influence and have modified the strength of the fraternity system.