Provinces

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced by name the scholarly beneficiaries of its munificence, to the extent of $143,000, for the coming year. Newspapers gave the item the prominence due to anything connected with the name of Simon Guggenheim, onetime U. S. Senator from Colorado (father of the memorialized John Simon Guggenheim, deceased 1922). They explained that the $3,500,000 foundation was to foster research work by young, productive U. S. scholars and artists; that some 600 such scholars applied for fellowships, this year 63 of them being rewarded. But the newspapers made no attempt to explain what the 63 lucky ones would now hurry off to do with their money.

Far, far away is the day when a Francis Bacon could take "all knowledge" for his "province" and not be speedily committed to a private hospital. What, for example, could even semi-encyclopaedic newsgatherers make of "the purification of colloids by electro-dialysis," the feat which Guggenheim money will aid Dr. Richard Bradfield, soil professor at the University of Missouri to accomplish? Dr. William Henry Eyster's project, at the University of Maine, to study "the physiology of chloroplastid pigments," was equally inscrutable. And why should Dr. Ralph Erskine Cleland of Goucher College be given money to pry into "the chromosome constitution and behavior of the evening primrose [Oenothera]"! What services would be rendered mankind by Dr. Frederick Charles Dietz of the University of Illinois, studying "English government finance from 1558 to 1640"; or Dr. Marion Elizabeth Blake, Converse College, scrutinizing "the Republican and Augustan pavements of Italy"; or Dr. Philip Franklin of Massachusetts Institute of Technology going to Germany and Switzerland to ponder "integral equations, orthogonal functions and their relation to almost periodic function"?

Laymen despaired, but the researchers plodded ahead with tasks which very much resembled the work done nowadays by government surveyors. The continent is outlined; its lakes, rivers, mountain ranges, state and county boundaries are mapped. But here remains a pond, a creek, the slope and extent of a watershed, the soil character of an unsettled valley, whose position and specifications need determining.

In the realm of knowledge, there is "the influence of public opinion upon the foreign policy of the Third [present] French Republic," through an analysis of which Dr. Eber Malcolm Carroll of Duke University may help U. S. statesmen make sense with puzzling Paris.

There are "low temperature effects on plants," of which Dr. Rodney Beecher Harvey of the University of Minnesota is a connoisseur. He will go to England and Russia and demonstrate how a carload of green fruit can be ripened in transit with 40 cents' worth of ethylene gas.

Dr. Ford Keeler Brown's (St. John's College) proposal, to investigate "the ideas and life of Mrs. Hannah More, an unusual representative of conservative English thought from 1780 to 1830," sounded precious, but from such biographies are spun the rich texture of the past.