The New Monthly.

To give its readers at any time of the year so excellent a number as that which starts the present volume--the thirty-ninth--is an achievement for which the Monthly may be proud. But coming as it does at the beginning of a year it reduces to the minimum the suspicion of its being a merely temporary improvement and practically assures the permanence of innovations, of no inconsiderable moment, and a return to a sane view of what is due to a college man from a magazine published supposedly for his benefit. In this light the latest development of the Monthly as showing in its first number has its chief significance. Whether former editors will object to a change in policy which relegates to the memories of the past graduate articles of the literary mysticism of somebody's minor poems, which have been the cause of the Monthly's failure to find readers other than the purely literary, is a matter for future decision. Certain it is that the undergraduate will not object, and will gladly welcome the Monthly into the active life of the University and help it to the place of influence to which the efforts of its editors in the interest of the University give it claim.

Outside the typographical improvements which include a shortened reading line, the featuring of the "leader," and trimmed edges, the reading matter is of exceptional interest. A more straight-forward, sensible and well-written article than "The Crew Coach" by W. H. L. Bell '04, is seldom if ever seen in an undergraduate publication. His view may not be the correct one but the manner in which he writes will find it many supporters; and it is well worth reading. Of the other contributions, "The Skipper of Halibut Bay," a story by C. H. Brown '05, and "The Greater Birth," a poem by H. Hagedorn, Jr., '07, are of unusual excellence, but require such exceptional quality to give them preeminence over the other articles of the issue.