NON-FICTION

Mother of Continents

Some time ago, perhaps 15 million years, there were watery depressions in the enormous slab of territory that is now called Mongolia--reedy lakes along whose shores fed cold-blooded brutes of preposterous, hobgoblin shapes and proportions. Some were small, only eight or nine feet long, with skins no thicker than ordinary linoleum. Their necks were like fire-hose, ending in froggish heads. Their posteriors stuck out like a lizard's, into muscular tails. Their forelegs were futile flippers but astern were haunches like a bull ostrich, for swift, stooped running on webbed and clawed feet. Many of these creatures were vegetarians and some who grew to 18-and 20-foot lengths developed rounded bills, like a giant duck's, to fill their monstrous wrinkled paunches. Certain species, having laid in arsenals of teeth, were meateaters and not in the least squeamish about devouring their peaceful relatives. In time, one sensible clan specialized in defense, going always on all fours, with armor plate on a humpy back and a flange of skull spread back fanwise to protect the neck. On the forehead grew three horns; the upper lip hardened and hooked downward in a terrible beak.

By Mongolia's lakes and marshy meadows these creatures laid their reptilian eggs; roamed, fought and died, their heavy carcasses sometimes sinking into quicksands, or being dragged by currents into still backwaters, to settle in silt. . . . After perhaps eight million years, other creatures ruled Mongolia. They were warm-blooded, milk-giving, viviparous--mammals from tiny moles to a shaggy monster with columnar legs and a neck long enough to browse on treetops, a sort of elephantine giraffe. . . . After several millions of years there grew up in mammalia an erect Two-Legs who learned to use tools. . . .

Mongolia's climate changed. Dry winds shriveled the vegetation; drifting sand built hills on old lakebeds. What had once been a green animal paradise became a desert called Gobi, sparsely inhabited by a sturdy but backward breed of humans, together with herds of wild asses, antelopes, domesticated sheep and draft camels. The centuries passed. . . .

Poring over maps in Manhattan in the so-called 20th century, Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History put two enormous twos together and obtained a daring hypothetical four: similar fossils having been found in Europe and in western North America, there must have been a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska; central Asia had been the original point of dispersal of the animal kingdom, including mankind. Dr. Osborn mentioned the matter to his ablest zoologist and that young man, Roy Chapman Andrews, industriously raised half a million dollars to take a band of assorted scientists into the Gobi for five years of intensive digging. As every one knows, the Andrews expeditions have thus far unearthed sufficient in the way of dinosaur skeletons and eggs, rare baluchitheria and traces of Mousiterian man to substantiate Dr. Osborn's hypothesis in spectacular fashion (TIME, Oct. 29, 1923, et seq.). The program has been extended and paleontological portents impend for four years to come. "Asia is the mother of the continents."

In this quiet account* of his doings, Digger Andrews makes plain what a sizable undertaking it has been. Other scientists pooh-poohed the notion of fossils lying in one of the globe's most desolate wildernesses. Travelers said that no fleet of Dodge, or any other, cars could go where even camels limp. China teemed with soldiers and brigands. Drought and sand storms were growing yearly worse. . . . But the Dodges pulled again. Urga was reached and passed again and again. Heady preparations, an invaluable caravan chief and keen diplomacy made life not merely possible but enjoyable. Good humor, good sportsmanship and firm purpose seem to have been the prime characteristics of Mr. Andrews' cosmopolitan score of associates, and as their historian, Mr. Andrews is as lively as he is conscientious. He finds room to mention strenuous game hunts, native customs and practical jokes quite as plentifully as epochal discoveries and scientific excitement. There is not one boast in the book, and there might pardonably be many.

VERSE

Poems XIII

EAST WIND -- Amy Lowell -- Houghton Mifflin ($2.25). This second of the three volumes of poems left for posthumous publication by Amy Lowell is as impersonal as the first volume (What's O'Clock?, 1925) was personal. It contains 13 narratives, mostly in the free, conversational verse that Miss Lowell adapted as a net to catch the crabbed dialect of her much-cherished New England. That dialect imposed restrictions upon her crystalline and pyrotechnic fancy, but only in the matter of actual words. When a New Englander needs an image for swarming bees he may not bethink him of showered stars, yet sparks from a Fourth of July pinwheel are quite as effective and wholly permissible. Similarly, the macabre, the delicately gruesome, of which Miss Lowell was so fond, is to be found quite as handily in a neurotic seafarer's terror of growing grass, or in a drawling village dracula, as in the rat-runs of a cathedral's Gothic spire. As always, there are stunning eccentricities. Having used "apotheosis" in one of her lines, Miss Lowell hastened to end the next with "bulldozed."

Houses figure in many of these 13 narratives, as vessels for the supernatural, as entities living in their own right and having their own ghosts, both life and afterlife being bestowed by simple or sensitive folk. And always house furnishings are noted, with the piercing significance and tenderness that made Amy Lowell so distinctly a poet of her time and place, racy. Titles intimate the subjects: "The House in Main Street," "The Note Book in the Gate-Legged Table," "The Rosebud Wall-Paper," "The Real Estate Agent's Tale." The title of the collection came, perhaps, out of Amy Lowell's love for a fresh breeze off the ocean, bringing rain to dry New England in hot summer. It might stand for herself, who blew with sharp zest through lives and times notoriously parched.

FICTION

Father Brown

THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN--G. K. Chesterton--Dodd, Mead ($2). The figure of Father Brown is nearly 15 years old, but his novelty has not diminished. Mr. Chesterton has invented a new kind of detective story, unlike all the familiar ones of tradition. How can a detective proceed without "deduction"? Father Brown does everything by intuition; he solves mysteries not by analysis but by his freedom from some universal obsession under which everybody else is laboring.

There is a postman, for instance. "Nobody notices postmen nowadays," says Father Brown, "yet they have passions like other men, and even carry a sack in which a small corpse may conveniently be stowed." The postman it was, you soon see, who entered the house where the murder was committed in plain view of a dozen people; they all said they'd seen "no one." And so on. Nearly every tale hangs on some such paradox, and through each runs like an overtone a moral or mystical hypothesis seemingly irrelevant at first. "Yes," says Father Brown, "I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelt backwards." His theme, that dogs have doglike intelligences and not human or superhuman ones, appears at last as the reducing agent for a perplexing homicide. Father Brown's charm compels the reader even before it is seen what he is driving at, a stage where every other detective is an insufferable bore. With his simplicity and shrewdness and "gesture of botheration," he is a unique and lovable literary creation.

The situations are deliberately fantastic, the dialogue incredible. Father Brown, having solved a mystery, spins it out at a great length, receiving meanwhile the unlikeliest leading questions from his more than accommodating audience, all to make the reader's flesh creep. It does not matter. Chesterton's detective stories are the best. Their very unrealness is all part of an atmosphere that is worth a dozen watertight, copper-bottomed mysteries of the Conan Doyle sort. And together with O. Henry he leaves everyone else nowhere when it comes to the "nub." The stories in the latest volume are rather more strained and less psychologically brilliant than some of the earlier ones and it is a matter for dismay that he should have set the scene so often in America, where he is not much at home. But a few are up to the old form, while even the least is marked with Chesterton's freakish, withal homely, personality.

Cock-Eyed

THE GOLDEN DANCER -- Cyril Hume--Doran ($2). A lyric youth, Author Hume trisects his work with panic titles. I. Satyr Pilgrimage. Wherein Albert Wells, dreamer, coward, leaves the grinning teeth of his factory machine to seek a woodland nymph "golden-smooth as dark honey." He climbs hills, sits on them; he drinks from brooks, bathes in them. He rides with a Truckdriver who likes "a girl that has some husk." Unexpectedly he meets his little "Dap-henny" (Daphne) of the honeyed limbs. He settles in Jericho (New England) to be near her dancing pasture. II. Pan Forsaken. Wherein Albert Wells, dreamer, coward, becomes the leading Babbitt of backwoods Jericho. Upon a shiny soda-fountain and elite summer garden he builds success. But he sees little "Dap-henny" only in his attic dreams. There is a strange revolution in Jericho -- Booster Wells being ousted by a combine of bootleggers and Pilgrim fathers. III. The Dryad Dances. Wherein Albert Wells, dreamer, loses cowardice and consciousness, smitten by the Truckdriver's fist. (Author Hume reverts for a moment to the flaming days of The Wife of the Centaur.) Albert Wells awakens as "Dap-henny's" lips "wiggle delightfully" on his. One night a wise old owl sees two awkward white frogs dancing in a moon-flooded meadow. (The fire in Mr. Hume ebbs.) There follows some sentimentalizing on marriage. The story ends happily, but slowly--a cockeyed kind of book, casually flung together with self-conscious talent. Pastel and Flesh

MANNEQUIN--Fannie Hurst-- Knopf ($2). The magazine Liberty offered $50,000 for "the best U. S. novel." This is what won it. The Liberty editors were shrewd. Scores of thousands moon over Fannie Hurst. She seldom writes in whole sentences, just strings of phrases that are easy to read. Fannie Hurst, too, was shrewd. The scores of thousands would be sure to like something in smart pastel and flesh tints; names like Orchid and aristocratic Rhincoop; gusts of rejected passion; provocative virtue beset and then delivered; harrowing suspense, sudden twists, dovetailed coincidence. It took small effort, (a suit for plagiarism says it took none at all) to evolve the story of Orchid Sargossa, chaste mannequin, who, after being acquitted of the murder of the Manhattan clubman that tried to rape her, suddenly discovered she was her judge's long-lost daughter. )

Perennial Senior

FRATERNITY Row--Lynn and Lois Montross--Doran ($2). Yale men were angry when Owen Johnson created Stover. Princetonians writhed to think that the world would see them all in This Side of Paradise. At Brown University they detested Prof. Percy Marks for The Plastic Age. Now the state university has been brought to print, as never before save in Town and Gown (1925) by the same authors.

In this case, there will be no discomfort. Males who have worn raccoon coats and oiled their hair; who have exchanged a million vapidities in fraternity houses; who have envied the head cheerleader, preened their slang, toddled all night, slaved for watch charms; and the girls they haye petted on sorority porches, girls with giddy shingles and cooing "lines"; girls with "dates" and pledge pins, innocent thirsts, crushes on young instructors, favorite love lyrics, proud independence and timid curiosity about Freud--these and their guardians, too, professors of both sexes, young and old, comfortably pedantic or secretly frustrate, testily brainy or docile and indulgent--even prexies, "the old boy with the gold-headed cane and administrative complex"--all these will suddenly find themselves exposed in a bright light of irony, but a light playing gently, warm with humor and comprehension. More extraordinary, the legendary figure of Andy Protheroe is so keenly and completely alive that it must irresistibly delight that growing herd whose sophistication includes an uninquisitive scorn of mass coeducation.

Andy Protheroe is the midwestern brother of Stover's immortal ally, Doc MacNooder. Breezy, flippant, crass, unquenchable, he now, in the day of elective courses, appears as the perennial senior; and, rough clothes and manners having gone out, as campus: fashion-plate and ladies' man (snake, fusser, petter, necker, lizard, sheik, as you will). He retains the MacNooder eloquence and syncopates it, polishing his quips for quotation, studying his audience. MacNooder's political finesse is his, refined and extended even unto sorority elections. His rostrum is at the mass meeting, in front of the grandstand, on the Charleston floor.

Most of the 16 episodes related hinge lightly upon Andy's habitual infatuations and insouciant technique. There is a great deal of sprightly nonsense, gorgeous absurdity and amazingly glib barbarism. Here and there comes a cut, neat and very close to the bone: a program to allow university women some escape from the sex-consciousness forced upon them by deans, pastors and mothers; the logic of a star halfback who turns professional (Red Grange) ; a moss-grown professor's vivid, wistful wife; a crisp instructress who secretly, cherishing lost youth's glamor, rouges her ear-tips. Time and again this book comes alarmingly near to telling just what that divine peril, youth's glamor, actually is.

Burke of Limehouse

EAST OF MANSION HOUSE -- Thomas Burke--Doran ($2). A Cockney urchin once gazed through the musty windows of an old Chinaman's store in the India Dock Road and experienced some-thing unforgettable. Whether it was a glory, a wisdom or a peace passing understanding, the urchin has never yet been able to say in so many words. But it was an experience sufficient to supply Thomas Burke with a lifetime's devotion to the Limehouse district of London, where he and Charles Spencer Chaplin were Cockney urchins together. He is still writing out of the heart of that simple miracle worked by the parchment countenance of his old Chinaman, who later made signs and bestowed ginger. He still writes, briefly--of a sad-singing Chinee poet who could but die when well-meaning friends supplied him with his heart's desire; of a Chinee hunchback who may have been white-feathered Eros for a Limey roustabout and his pretty moll; or of a pious Chinee merchant who sacrificed his family tablets, and something besides, for his friend the police sergeant. There are other tales, more drab and theatrical, of factory creatures in Stewpony and Clutterfield; and some people think that Author Burke overdoes the seamy side of things. Yet even in a seam he turns up the bright thread. Moreover, he sometimes writes close to subtle, sensitive perfection.

Exacting Parent

WAYS OF ESCAPE--Noel Forrest --Little, Brown ($2). All blessings fell to Stephen Heath, arrogant brave, self-sufficient British parent. "Heath's luck? I look ahead and leave nothing to chance," said he. Yet his friend, Paul Kenyon, prophesied that he would pay for his happiness "to the uttermost farthing." He did. One child left home; another married a rotter; another became a felon. The youngest, whom Stephen really, finally loved, worked himself to death trying to please. Such a tale, such a well defined autocrat as Stephen Heath, might serve the ends of young things with harsh, exacting papas, but Author Forrest spoils most of his effects by belaboring the obvious, philosophizing stodgily.

THE PENTON PRESS Co., CLEVELAND

*ON THE TRAIL OF ANCIENT MAN--Roy Chapman Andrews--Putnam ($6).