At Leeds

"... I have reason to believe," wrote the Prince of Wales, "that when anyone in this country digs up a bone, his first instinct (subject to the intervention of the police) is to send it to Sir Arthur Keith. . . ."

His Royal Highness was formally retiring, by letter, as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The members of that august body, assembled last week at Leeds, reflected that their retiring president had been a perfunctory one. His inaugural pronouncement a year ago, like his retiring one now, had alluded vaguely to "the value of scientific research in relation to imperial development"--glossing over, for the rest, a royal ignorance of science itself with a few royal witticisms (TIME, Aug. 16, 1926). Now a real scientist was president again. The Association might get on with its business. The members settled back to attend President Sir Arthur Keith, who made every effort to transport his audience from the perfunctory to the profound.

Darwin to Date. It was 68 years since that gentlest of men, Charles Darwin, had trundled into position a battery of facts, collected patiently for many years, and blown mankind from its citadel of Biblical belief in its special divine origin. Sir Arthur Keith, whose audience included a kingdomful of radio listeners and a worldful of newspaper readers, proposed to review the Darwinian batteries; to report on their condition and any changes made in them since Darwin's time; and to affirm, once for all, the official stand of British science on Darwin's proposition that humanity and apedom had a common ancestor.

Sir Arthur confined himself to nothing more than a bare outline of Darwin's achievement, contenting himself with the assertion that the human species has been evolved from a "humble primate animal" and that man and ape have a common ancestor. The theory itself was not otherwise touched upon.

On the great strides made since Darwin's day Sir Arthur was more specific. And he ended by asking: "Was Darwin right when he said that man under the action of biological forces which can be observed and measured, has been raised from a place among the anthropoid apes to that which he now occupies ? The answer is Yes! and in returning this verdict I speak but as foreman of the jury, a jury which has been empaneled from men who have devoted a lifetime to weighing the evidence. To the best of my ability I have avoided, in laying before you the evidence on which our verdict was found, the role of special pleader, being content to follow Darwin's own example--Let the truth speak for itself!" Having congratulated the president upon a masterful pronouncement, British science listened to further addresses.

Rythm. Dr. G. P. Bidder extended Sir Arthur's history of mankind back to pelagic times, saying: "We owe our appreciation of dancing, poetry, music and our sense of rhythm to the actions we made when we were only tiny blobs of jelly flagellates, millions of years ago."

Transatlantic Television. Long-haired John L. Baird, young perfecter of television, announced that he had arranged with British postal authorities to attempt transmission of visual impressions across the Atlantic on the Government radio system. He added that he and the Columbia Graphophone Co. had succeeded in translating the electrical impulses or television into impressions on a phonograph record, whence they can be retranslated, making sights as well as sounds issue from the most modern version of a "music box."

Quantum Theory. Some 200 mathematical physicists listened, perhaps none of them with understanding, to the address of Dr. W. Heisenberg, young German, on the quantum theory of the structure of the universe. The quantum theory, as originated three decades ago by Dr. Max Planck, denies the existence of matter, as commonly conceived, replacing it with energy in basic units called quanta. As modified by Dr. Heisenberg, quanta depart entirely from such reality as can be apprehended by the senses, becoming terms in pure mathematics. Like the first few people to understand Dr. Albert Einstein, the Heisenberg enthusiasts agreed that the modified quantum theory is of epochal theoretical importance but, to laity, as negligible as it is incomprehensible, as yet.

The Poles. Nearer earth, but still far off, were the speculations about polar geography offered by Dr. R. N. Rudmose Brown. The Arctic, he felt, will be of great importance when economic pressure sends American and European herdsmen to replace the vanishing Eskimo on the five million square miles of treeless Arctic tundra, to raise billions of sheep, reindeer, musk ox, caribou. The possibilities of such herding are already indicated by the half million reindeer that have been reared in northern Alaska from a herd of 1,300 introduced in 1902. The Antarctic will always be less important than the Arctic economically, thinks, Dr. Brown, but it offers what remains in the world of spectacular pioneering. Huge "missing stretches" of the supposed Antarctic continent remain to be mapped. The terrific Antarctic blizzards have yet to be explained. Without referring directly to Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd's proposed Antarctic airplane survey next year, Dr. Brown deprecated exploration from the air as too swift and cursory to execute the patient observation and accurate measurements needed.

Heat Mines. An unassuming, bespectacled gentleman, John L. Hodgson, mining engineer, asked his hearers to realize how crude were the surface scrapings made by the earliest coal "miners" in comparison with the vast black honeycombs modern machinery digs--and then to realize how picayune were present-day coal mines compared to the shafts that might some day be driven, 30 miles into the earth's crust, to tap a store of heat 31 million times as great as all the heat stored in the world's aggregate coal deposits. A 30-mile bore, one foot in diameter, could obviously not be dug by human labor. But an eroding alloy of aluminum would do it, melted by electricity, circulated by hot air at a pressure of more than 250,000 Ibs. to the square inch. That is about the pressure of the earth's rocky crust 30 miles down, a pressure under which the friction of rock layers sliding on one another generates at least 1,600DEG Fahr. Such a hole would produce 4,000 horsepower if only 20% efficient, making steam of any quantity of water piped down it. If such a bore were impracticable, two larger shafts, five miles deep, could be dug by laborers in heat proof, air-cooled suits, and connected by long horizontal passages. At five miles, a heat between 400DEG and 450DEG would be obtained. Capable of producing 4,500 horsepower, this type of heat mine would function for 1,-000 years, would cost about 30 millions but never need an ounce of fuel.

New Britons. Males five feet nine inches (four inches taller than now), females five feet six or seven inches (two inches taller), skulls proportionally higher and shorter than before--these, said Professor F. G. Parsons of the anthropology division, are characteristics of the typical Britons now evolving in harmony with the conditions of modern life.

Cosmic Rays. The hall was packed to hear Dr. Robert A. Millikan of California Institute of Technology report on another summer's investigation of the all-penetrating ether vibrations, or universal rays, detected a quarter-century ago but not measured until two years ago, by Dr. Millikan. New measurements, taken with instruments eight times as sensitive as before, in snow-fed lakes at high altitudes in Bolivia and California, showed the rays to have twice the penetration Dr. Millikan last reported. They reached his instruments through 120 feet of water, the equivalent of eleven feet of lead, the X- ray-stopping metal. Impinging on the earth from an unknown source on the universe, these rays are apparently passing through all living things at all times, part of our natural environment. What of their effect on life? Whence do they come ?

In Dr. Millikan's audience was Dr. Werner Kohlhoerster of Germany, cosmic ray specialist who last year announced from an observation pit in the Alps that he thought the rays emanated, at present, chiefly from the northeastern heavens, where the constellations Orion, Hercules and Andromeda are giving off enormous quantities of energy from spiral (star-forming) nebulae (TIME, Oct. 25).