For many years the two societies Alpha Nu and Adelphi have occupied two rooms on the fourth floor of University Hall, the only student organizations entirely independent of Faculty patronage thus recognized. Why they have not come to occupy the prominent place that two similar organizations hold at Princeton, the Clio and Whig societies, whose two marble temples are one of the distinguishing marks of Princeton's Campus, is a matter for speculation. Probably the fact that Princeton long remained a college while Michigan early became a university with a more inclusive curriculum, will best explain it. As it is, however, these societies have in the past done a great service for the University and deserve to survive. They are not, however, the only student organizations which have had exercise in public speaking as their reason for existence, for many such have come and gone, only to be remembered by their own student generation and by the heavy weight of their classical names. Such were a multitude of debating clubs which sprang up in the "60's" under such impressive titles as "Homotrapezoi," "Philozetian," "Panarmonian," or, in the Law Department, the less pretentious "Douglas," "Clay," and "Lincoln" Societies which were the forerunners of the present Jeffersonian and Webster Societies. A latter-day organization has been the long popular "Toastmaster's Club" which aims to perpetuate the doubtful joys of after-dinner oratory. Other means of self-expression for those oratorically bent, were those formal exhibitions of which the long-popular annual Junior Exhibition was the most prominent. Nowadays, the only vestige of student participation in programs of this character remains in the annual Class Day Exercises. Another organization which stimulated interest in platform speaking was the Students' Lecture Association, which was until recently one of the most successful undergraduate enterprises. It was organized in September, 1854, and continued for nearly sixty years to bring distinguished and sometimes, judged by later-day standards, undistinguished speakers before student audiences. It ceased to exist in 1912, but only after the broadening interests of the University began to attract to Ann Arbor many prominent visitors whose addresses have been usually given free of charge, while at the same time the multiplication of other forms of entertainment lessened the attractions of the traditional lecture course. But an association which, in its day, brought to Ann Arbor such men as Emerson, Bayard Taylor, Horace Mann, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Henry Ward Beecher, Winston Spencer Churchill, Henry M. Stanley, Wu Ting Fang, and Presidents Harrison, McKinley, Cleveland, and Wilson, played no minor role in University life. That the privilege of hearing some of these speakers was not always properly appreciated is shown by the comments of the editor of one of the local papers on a lecture by Emerson.