At Manhattan

Last week Manhattanites buzzed about a booming market, bustled for baseball tickets, queued up before movie palaces, applauded Smith on the Vitaphone.

Few noted a staid though flag-bedecked building on East 41st Street. Of what importance could it be? Where were crowds, vociferous fanfare? Yet inside were 140 Englishmen, 200 Americans carefully explaining what they had scientifically done for industry. They made up the Society of Chemical Industry. Their meeting was the first held in the U. S. since the War.

Eternal cycle. Among those whose minds were groping for the heart of being rather than its stomach was Robert Andrews Millikan, Nobel Prize winner, student of the cosmic ray (TIME, Nov. 23, 1925),/- physicist of the California Institute of Technology. For years he has been in the vanguard of those attacking the foundations of the universe.

The occasion of Dr. Millikan's address was the award made to him of the Messel Medal, an award bestowed by the society every two years upon the person whose work has been most conducive to the progress of science.

Dr. Millikan explained that there was no reason apparent why the universe should ever end, implied that it had never even begun. Somewhere in the depths of space, he believed, helium, oxygen, silicon and iron were being formed from the ultimate constituent of all matter, the electron. "In the hot stars and the sun," he said, "matter is being disintegrated into energy or radiation: in the unimaginably cold expanse of space, radiation or energy is being reintegrated into matter."

This reintegration evinced itself in the cosmic rays, which he described as the "birth-cries" of the atoms, radiations pouring in upon the earth from infinite space by night as well as by day, a fact excluding solar explanations, emanation capable of penetrating eighteen feet of lead, a far greater depth than any other known rays.

Cows. Dr. Millikan's abstractions were the exception, not the rule. Other reports dealt with some of these practical benefits derived from pure science. Francis Howard Car of England, president of the society, reported experiments indicating that the stock-carrying capacity of pastures and consequently their output of meat or milk may be increased to an unexpectedly high level. One-half an acre of grass intensively treated with nitrates for the purpose suffices as a substitute for the usual two or three acres required to graze a cow or its equivalent for a season.

Glass. A. E. Marshall, consulting engineer of the Corning Glass Works, pointed out the possibility of glass pavements for city streets, glass roofs for houses, glass furniture, glass plumbing.

Lilacs. Lilacs bloom for Christmas when Dr. Frank Earl Denny, research director of the Boyce Thompson Institute at Yonkers wishes it. Likewise two crops of potatoes grow for him where only one obliges the efforts of another. Nature has given plants a dormancy period which is the plague of horticulturists. Dr. Denny found that exposure to the vapors of ethylene chlorhydrin and ethylene dichloride waked plants up immediately.

Gas. Dr. Benjamin Talbott Brooks said that he could make petroleum taste like soap and peaches, did not foresee that petroleum would be diverted from its main purpose of driving automobiles.