Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/345

 humorsome and bizarre elements of the population tend to attach themselves to the permanent staff of an educational centre, we leave to the theorists. At all events, there they are; and by some inner twist of student psychology, the longer they remain and the more freakish they grow, the more they are beloved. They, and the traditions connected with them, become a fixed and precious part of the scholastic system. College would hardly be college without them. Thus sheltered and encouraged, these odd specimens of humanity have persisted in the groves of Academe longer than anywhere else, like those strange forms of life, extinct in the world at large, which are still found by the naturalist in distant and untroubled isles of the sea.

But to-day, even in their last asylum, they seem in danger of disappearing. Has the University grown too sophisticated to enjoy any longer these delightful educational by-products? Cannot they still be fostered and reanimated to continue the old traditions—to brighten and vary the smug monotony of our modern routine? It were a thousand pities if the long chain should now be broken whose links bind us to such a far-distant antiquity. In the English universities the bedell, the gyp, the bull-dog, and other collegiate curiosities, have come down from a remote medieval past, always noted for their personal peculiarities, and licensed by immemorial